The status of Mesnil's 1949 Die Fliegen genus-group names (Diptera : Tachinidae).

Evenhuis, N.L. and O'Hara, J.E. (2008). "The status of Mesnil's 1949 Die Fliegen genus-group names (Diptera : Tachinidae).", Zootaxa, 1827, pp. 65-68.

Abstract

The proposal of 14 genus-group names in Tachinidae by Mesnil in his 1949 Lieferung of Die Fliegen der palaearktischen Region are researched to determine their validity and the first validation of each name. Three of these, Paradrino Mesnil, Pimelimyia Mesnil, and Tamaromyia Mesnil, previously thought to be unavailable in that work are found here to be valid by type fixation by monotypy. Louis P. Mesnil was a prolific taxonomist who published more than 90 articles on the Tachinidae between the years 1936 and 1980 (O’Hara 1996). During the course of his long career he proposed 838 new species-group names and erected 172 new genus-group names (O’Hara 1996). Mesnil published extensively on the tachinid faunas of the Palaearctic, Oriental, and Afrotropical Regions but is best known for his career-long contributions to Lindner’s series Die Fliegen der palaearktischen Region (1944-1980). Die Fliegen der palaearktischen Region was originally published in Lieferungen (fascicles) of arbitrary length, often consisting of a portion of an author’s submitted manuscript. In some instances the names of new taxa were published in a key in one Lieferung and the descriptions appeared in subsequent Lieferungen. This created nomenclatural havoc and later taxonomists were faced with the difficult task of sorting out the validity and dating of new taxa proposed within a series of Lieferungen. O’Hara (1996) attempted to standardize the nomenclatural aspects of Mesnil’s taxa published in Die Fliegen, but overlooked the validation of three generic names in Mesnil (1949a) as reviewed below. Genus-group names proposed after 1930 are unavailable if they did not have a type species fixation (whether by original designation or monotypy). Mesnil (1949a) provided a key in Die Fliegen to the genus-group taxa of the “Sturmiina” (part of present-day Goniini in the Exoristinae) and included 14 new genus-group names, many of them representing taxa found only outside the Palaearctic Region. These 14 new genus-group names are researched here to determine their earliest validation and present status. Three of them, Paradrino, Pimelimyia and Tamaromyia, which were provided with characters to differentiate them in the key, were previously thought to be unavailable because no species were included until subsequent Lieferungen of the Die Fliegen series (e.g., O’Hara 1996). However, for each, a single species has been found in combination with the genus-group name in that Lieferung, thus fixing the type species by monotypy for each and validating the name from that work.