Higher resolution figure plates and original images of "Fossil evidence of elytra reduction in ship-timber beetles"

Higher resolution figure plates and original images of "Fossil evidence of elytra reduction in ship-timber beetles".

Yamamoto, S. (2019) Fossil evidence of elytra reduction in ship-timber beetles. Scientific Reports, 9: 4938. (doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-41310-1).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41310-1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41310-1

Abstract

Beetles (Coleoptera) comprise about one quarter of all described animal species. One of the main contributors to their evolutionary success is the elytra, or hardened forewings, which have protective functions while maintaining their ability to fly. Unlike other beetles, some ship-timber beetles (Lymexylidae) have extremely small elytra and largely exposed functional hindwings. There is little fossil evidence illuminating the evolutionary history of short elytra in lymexylids. Here, I report five well-preserved lymexylid fossils in mid-Cretaceous and Cenozoic ambers from Myanmar (ca. 99 million years ago [Mya]), Russia (ca. 44 Mya), and the Dominican Republic (ca. 16 Mya). Three Cretaceous fossils have strongly reduced, shortened elytra, with unexpected variation in elytral size and shape, whereas very small, modified elytra are found only in much younger Dominican amber. These morphologically diverse extinct lymexylids shed new light on the early origin and evolutionary history of elytra reduction and its diverse variation in the ship-timber beetles. Based on the striking morphological similarities with extant lymexylids, these extinct taxa might have had the same, or similar, ecological, behavioural, and flight modes as the extant ship-timber beetles.

Figure 1, caption:

Diverse Lymexylidae beetles, dorsal views. (a–c) Atractocerinae from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, d Atractocerinae from mid-Eocene Baltic amber, e Atractocerinae from early Middle Miocene Dominican amber, (f–k) extant representatives of Lymexylidae, taken from each subfamily. (a) Vetatractocerus burmiticus gen. et sp. nov., holotype, FMNHINS-3965988. (b) Raractocetus extinctus sp. nov., holotype, FMNHINS-3965989. (c) R. fossilis sp. nov., holotype, FMNHINS-3965990. (d) R. balticus sp. nov., holotype, FMNHINS-3965991. (e) Atractocerus sp., FMNHINS-3965992. (f) Melittomma sericeum (Harris), Melittommatinae, from Indiana, U.S.A., showing fully developed, complete elytra. (g) Hylecoetus dermestoides (L.), Hylecoetinae, from Derbyshire, U.K., showing well developed, but slightly reduced elytra. (h) Lymexylon navale (L.), Lymexylinae, from Suffolk, U.K., showing well developed, but moderately reduced elytra. (i–k) A. brasiliensis Lepeletier & Audinet-Serville, Atractocerinae, from Bluefields, Nicaragua, showing distinctly reduced, minute elytra; (i) dorsal habitus, (j) enlargement of elytron from (i), (k) elytron. Photos credits: (g,h) by Udo Schmidt, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license (CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/), derived from Wikimedia Commons, (h) modified. Scale bars: 3 mm (a,c,j), 5 mm (b,d,e–h), 1 cm (i), 1.5 mm (k).