TABANIDAE, Latreille, 1802

Grimaldi, David A., 2016, Diverse Orthorrhaphan Flies (Insecta: Diptera: Brachycera) In Amber From The Cretaceous Of Myanmar: Brachycera In Cretaceous Amber, Part Vii David A. Grimaldi, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2016 (408), pp. 1-132 : 42

FAMILY TABANIDAE

Females of most species of tabanids are hematophagous with notoriously painful or irritating “bites,” wherein skin is punctured with knifelike serrated mandibles. Some species, such as the longproboscid pangoniines, feed on flower nectar and pollen. The species-level taxonomy of tabanids is quite advanced, no doubt due to their conspicuous habits, medical significance, and their large, robust size. There are approximately 4450 species. The family is unquestionably monophyletic.

The traditional subfamily and tribal classification of Tabanidae (e.g., Mackerras, 1954, 1955) has been challenged recently by the molecular study of Morita et al. (2016), which was based on four genes (one mitochondrial, three nuclear). Pangoniinae , long thought to be the basalmost tabanids, appears to be a monophyletic sister group to all other tabanids ( Morita et al., 2016). Pangoniines plesiomorphically have eight free flagellomeres (vs. four, the others being fused), and an undivided ninth tergite in both sexes; the subfamily apomorphically has bifid gonostyli.

Tabanidae have a significant fossil record. Evenhuis (1994) listed seven Tertiary genera (all extant) with 14 species (several of these nomina nuda). It was not until 1994 that the first definitive Cretaceous tabanid was described, Cratotabanus stenomyomorphus (Martins-Neto and Kucera-Santos, 1994) . Since then five additional Cretaceous species have been described: Eopangonius pletus Ren ( Ren, 1998a) (Early Cretaceous: Yixian Formation, China), Baissomyia redita Mostovski et al. (2003) (Early Cretaceous: Zaza Formation, Russia) (placement uncertain); Eotabanoid lordi Mostovski et al. (2003) (Early Cretaceous: Purbeck Group, England), Cratotabanus newjerseyensis Grimaldi ( Grimaldi et al., 2011) (Late Cretaceous: Raritan Formation, New Jersey), Laiyangitabanus formosus J.-F. Zhang (2012) (Early Cretaceous: Laiyang Formation, China). Palaeopangonius eupterus Ren ( Ren, 1998a) was transferred to Athericidae ( Zhang, 2012; herein, above), but the position of this genus is ambiguous (above). The great majority of tabanid fossils are compressions, although two of the three Cretaceous species of Cratotabanus occur in amber, C. newjerseyensis and C. asiaticus , n. sp. (below). There are at least six described tabanid species in Tertiary amber (all in living genera or tribes), from the Miocene from the Dominican Republic and Mexico and Eocene of Baltic region (Evenhuis, 1994; Trojan, 2002; Strelow et al., 2013). I have seen several additional (undescribed) species in Tertiary ambers.