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Journal of Paleontology

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A NEW SPECIES REPRESENTING THE OLDEST APHID (HEMIPTERA, APHIDOMORPHA) FROM THE MIDDLE TRIASSIC OF CHINA

¹ Beijing Museum of Natural History, Beijing 100050, PRC
² The Geological Museum of China, Beijing 100034, PRC <zhjzhgmc@hotmail.com> or <zhjzhgmc@163.com>
³ Northwest A & F Univ., Yangling 712100, PRC
⁴ Holtegårdsvej 57, DK-2840, Denmark <o.e.heie@hotmail.com>

Key Words: Dracaphis • Aphidomorpha • Middle Triassic • China

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
A new aphid species, Dracaphis angustata, has been found in China from the Middle Triassic. It is especially informative because its whole body is preserved except for the distal part of the antennae and part of the legs. Only wings of three other aphid species of Triassic age have previously been found: Triassoaphis cubitus, described by Evans (1956) from Australia and placed in its own family, Triassoaphididae Heie, 1999; Creaphis theodora, described by Shcherbakov and Wegierek (1991) from Central Asia and placed in its own family, Creaphididae; and Coccavus supercubitus, described by Shcherbakov (2007) from Kyrgyzstan and placed in Naibiidae together with Naibia from the Lower Tertiary. The new species described below must be placed in its own family Dracaphididae because it possesses a combination of characters unknown in any other aphid clade.

Today about 4700 aphid species are known, so the number of fossil ones recorded so far, i.e., less than 250, seems very small. However the fossils indicate that several branches of the phylogenetic tree ended blindly, leaving the rather few that survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. These branches represent many extinct families (Becker-Migdisova, 1966, 1973; Richards, 1966; Heie, 1967, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1985; Kononova, 1976, 1977; Shaposhnikov, 1979; Heie and Poinar, 1988; Jarzembowski, 1989; Rayner and Waters, 1989; Hong and Wang, 1990; Wegierek, 1991; Carpenter, 1992; Heie and Pike, 1992, 1996; Wang, 1993; Lin, 1995; Heie and Wegierek, 1998; Heie and Penalver, 1999; Heie and Azar, 2000; Hong, 2002; Shcherbakov and Popov, 2002; Wegierek and Penalver, 2002). The classification used in this paper is that proposed by Heie (1981) with . . . [Full Text of this Article]