Palaeolindbergiella simlae ( Crawford, 1912 ) Burckhardt & Sharma & Raman, 2018

Burckhardt, Daniel, Sharma, Anamika & Raman, Anantanarayanan, 2018, Checklist and comments on the jumping plant-lice (Hemiptera: Psylloidea) from the Indian subcontinent, Zootaxa 4457 (1), pp. 1-38 : 21

Palaeolindbergiella simlae ( Crawford, 1912) , comb. nov.

Psylla longus [sic] Kandasamy, 1986, syn. nov.

Distribution. India ( Hodkinson 1983, 1986): Meghalaya ( Lahiri & Biswas 1990, as Psylla simlae complex), West Himalaya ( Mathur 1975, as Psylla sp. near simlae ).

Host plants. Bauhinia purpurea , B. variegata (Fabaceae) .

Comments. According to Mathur (1975), the female holotype (Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata), the only type specimen of Psylla simlae , is severely damaged. Awaiting evidence to the contrary, we assume that Crawford’s and Mathur’s material is conspecific. Psylla longus Kandasamy , also reported from Bauhinia , shares with P. simlae the body dimensions, the black genal processes and details of the forewing and terminalia , suggesting they are conspecific. Here we consider Psylla longus a junior synonym of P. simlae .

Originally described in Psylla , this species is not congeneric with Psylla alni ( Linnaeus, 1758) , the type species of Psylla . With P. primitiva Heslop-Harrison, 1961 , the type-species of Palaeolindergiella, it shares following characters: head weakly inclined from longitudinal body axis; median suture on vertex developed; genal processes less than 0.8 times as long as vertex along mid-line; preocular sclerite absent; basal spine of metatibia prominent; forewing with broad and often short pterostigma; female terminalia long, proctiger cuneate; circumanal ring oval. For this reason, it is formally transferred here to Palaeolindbergiella as P. simlae ( Crawford, 1912) , comb. nov. from Psylla .