Sphallomorpha Westwood

Genus Sphallomorpha Westwood View in CoL

Westwood, 1837: 414. – For additional literature records and diagnosis see Baehr (1992).

Type species. Sphallomorpha decipiens Westwood, 1837 View in CoL , by monotypy.

Diagnosis. Wide, depressed species with prognathous head, elongate legs, comparatively complete chetotaxy, normal shaped, not foliaceous female gonocoxite, and not physogastric larvae. As far as it was recorded, all species of this genus are oviparous. In males the terminal sternum is excised, and in both sexes it bears a variable number of elongate setae at the apical margin.

Note. As Baehr (1994 a) demonstrated, Sphallomorpha in many character states is plesiomorphic as compared with the other pseudomorphine genera, and thus it represents the adelphotaxon of all other genera of Pseudomorphinae.

The genus Sphallomorpha presently includes 159 species of which only 8 occur outside of Australia in New Guinea (Baehr 1992, 1993a,b, 1994a,b, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009a,b, 2010, 2014, 2016). Species of Sphallomorpha usually are wide and rather depressed, they are either unicolourous black or piceous, or bear various, sometimes very vivid colour patterns on elytra and/or pronotum. In Australia they occur in a great variety of habitats, provided that some tree growth is present, but apparently they are very rare in rain forest. The Australian species are known to live under the loose bark of tree trunks of various eucalypts or in deep bark crevices on rough-barked eucalypt and non-eucalypt trees. They are extremely agile, fast running beetles which fly deliberately, but are quite rarely encountered at light. The larvae of the very few species of which the larvae were recorded, apparently live by ants (Moore 1974), but are not decidedly physogastric as are the recorded larvae of the other pseudomorphine genera (Baehr 1997).

Baehr (1992) divided the genus into a number of putative monophyletic species groups which combine species that share certain synapomorphic character states of the external or genitalic morphology. The species described in the present paper does not belong to anyone group of the revision, according to the combination of certain character states of external and female genitalic morphology.