A new species of Eremobothynus Ohaus (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Dynastinae) from Argentina, with notes on Eremobothynus cornutus (Steinheil)
Author
Grossi, Paschoal Coelho
Author
Abadie, Esteban Ignácio
text
Zootaxa
2008
1733
57
60
journal article
10.5281/zenodo.181374
321f0d1f-9203-4f2e-8594-1dc16a9a1149
1175-5326
181374
Notes on
Eremobothynus cornutus
(
Steinheil, 1872
)
This species was described by
Steinheil (1872)
based on a single male and was originally placed in the genus
Scaptophilus
Burmeister, 1847
, which was later synonymized with
Bothynus
Hope, 1837
.
Ohaus (1910)
described the genus
Eremobothynus
to accommodate this species.
Ohaus (1910)
also described the female of
E
.
cornutus
, and mentioned that the three males he studied had a more developed horn than the “female” he examined. It is very probable that he was actually describing a very small male and mistook it for a female.
During the course of our studies, we examined a large number of male and female specimens of
E
.
cornutus
from the second author’s collection. All females examined were completely unarmed, with no horns or tubercles on the head (
Fig. 4
). Therefore, all identification keys (e.g.,
Endrödi 1969
,
Endrödi 1985
,
Ratcliffe 1981
,
Ratcliffe & Hardy 2005
) must be corrected to indicate that only males in
E
.
cornutus
have a frontal horn (
Fig. 3
), and that the pronotum is convex in females (
Fig. 4
) and not declivous as in males.