Archicera Szilády, 1934

Carles-Tolrá, Miguel, 2021, Description of the male of Archicera avarorum Szilády, 1934, and two new genera and species for Spain (Diptera: Rhagionidae), Arquivos Entomolóxicos 24, pp. 63-68 : 63-64

Genus Archicera Szilády, 1934

This genus was described as a subgenus of Ptiolina , including and describing Szilády (1934) in the same paper the sole species Archicera avarorum n. sp. The descriptions were based on only two females collected in Austria and Croatia. No time data was given by Szilády, but it is supposed that they were collected before the First World War (1914). Unfortunately, both specimens were destroyed in the fire of the Hungarian Natural History Museum (Budapest) in November, 1956. In 2017, a sole specimen (female) of A. avarorum was collected by Malaise trap in Romania, using Papp (2018) this very interesting female specimen to designate a neotype. Grootaert et al. (2020) collected 13 more specimens of A. avarorum in 2015 and 2017 in Belgium, all of them females too. For more details of the interesting history of this genus and species see Papp (2018) and Grootaert et al. (2020).

Archicera , as previously said, was originally described as a subgenus of Ptiolina , but Szilády treated the species simply as Archicera . It was even considered as a synonym of Spania Meigen, 1830 by Nagatomi (1982), Majer (1988) and Kerr (2010). The taxonomic status of Archicera is not completely clear but following Papp (2018), as Grootaert et al. (2020) did before, here it is considered as a genus until getting resolved its status.

Among the material studied, 3 specimens of A. avarorum were found but interestingly 2 of them are males and this sex is described in this paper for the first time.