Jurassic Rove Beetles Reveal 165 Million Years of Morphological and Probably Behavioral Stasis

Apr 29, 2014     Email"> PrintText Size

Staphylinidae (or rove beetles), belonging to Coleoptera of Insecta, is one the largest families of animals on the planet. With more than 58,000 described species, the family includes one extinct and 32 extant subfamilies. Olisthaerinae is one of the smallest subfamilies of rove beetles, containing only two modern and one fossil species. Jurassic rove beetles were mainly reported from the Upper Jurassic of Karatau, Kazakhstan, while very few were known from China. 

Recently, a PhD student Mr. CAI Chenyang, Prof. HUANG Diying from Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences together with Dr. Robert Beattie from Australia, reported two new olisthaerine rove beetles from the Middle Jurassic at Daohuhou Village, Ningcheng County, Inner Mongolia and the Upper Jurassic Talbragar fish beds in New South Wales, Australia. Compared with one species of the sole extant olisthaerine genus Olisthaerus, the fossil olisthaerine from Daohugou (Protolisthaerus jurassicus Cai et al., 2014) displays a remarkably similar appearance to the Recent species O. substriatus Paykull (Fig. 2), and they can be only distinguished from each other by very slight differences. 

Recent Olisthaerus speceis have very peculiar life-style; they live beneath the bark of coniferous trees. The remarkable morphological similarities between them probably suggest that Protolisthaerus jurassicus had the same subcortical lifestyle as its modern counterparts. The presence of abudant fossil conifers from Daohugou, such as Pityocladus and Yanliaoa, supports this hypothesis. The continuous presence of coniferous trees and the specific subcortical lifestyle are probably responsible for the long time morphological stasis in Olisthaerinae. In addition, the Recent olisthaerines are distributed in the northern temperate zone, including northern and central Europe, Asian Russia, Mongolia, and North America, while the discovery of an olisthaerine beetle from Australia greatly extends the geographical distribution of the small family (Fig. 2). Olisthaerinae was much more widespread and diverse in the Jurassic than previously assumed. 

This research was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China, Outstanding Youth Foundation of Jiangsu Province, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. 

Related information of the paper: Chenyang Cai, Robert Beattie, Diying Huang (2014) Jurassic olisthaerine rove beetles (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae): 165 million years of morphological and probably behavioral stasis. Gondwana Research, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2014.03.007. 

  

  

Fig. 1. Detailed comparison between the Middle Jurassic and Recent olisthaerines. (Image by NIGPAS)

  

Fig. 2. Global palaeogeographic reconstruction of the Late Jurassic, showing three Olisthaerinae-yielding localities. (Image by NIGPAS)