Afrotarus Jeannel, 1949

Rasool, Iftekhar, Felix, Ron F. F. L., Abdel-Dayem, Mahmoud S. & Aldhafer, Hathal M., 2017, A review of subtribe Cymindidina Laporte, 1834 (Coleoptera: Carabidae: Lebiini) in Southwestern Saudi Arabia, with descriptions of two new species, Zootaxa 4236 (1), pp. 157-171 : 159

Afrotarus Jeannel, 1949

Afrotarus is a polytypic genus of Cymindidina , comprising six described species distributed in East Africa, Arabia and Israel ( Bousquet 2012). Ball and Hichlie (1983) treated Afrotarus as a subgenus of Cymindis , but later on in Bousquet (2012) Afrotarus is a separate genus. Afrotarus species are very similar to some members of genus Cymindis but can be differentiated from the South Arabian species of the latter by two supraorbital ridges not branched and last labial palpomeres weakly dilated at apex. From the Arabian Peninsula only Afrotarus scotti is known, which was described from Yemen by Basilewsky (1948) and then reported from Saudi Arabia ( Mateu 1986). Although the holotype of A. scotti was not found, a paratype specimen from MRCA was examined and compared with Saudi materials preserved in the BMNH, which was identified by Mateu and recently collected during this work. Based on this, the Saudi specimens apparently similar to A. scotti paratype, are designated here as A. soudaensis sp. n. and A. fadli sp. n.