SCIADOCERINAE (Schmitz, 1929)

Grimaldi, David A., 2018, Basal Cyclorrhapha In Amber From The Cretaceous And Tertiary (Insecta: Diptera), And Their Relationships: Brachycera In Cretaceous Amber Part Ix David A. Grimaldi, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2018 (423), pp. 1-97 : 1-97

SUBFAMILY SCIADOCERINAE

DIAGNOSIS: Pretarsus with empodium either minute or completely lost. Acrostichals long, in 1–3 rows (except Ulrichophora ). Plesiomorphic features include: cells cup and bm present (closed); frons without median sulcus; tip of R 4+5 fully fused to C; sternites fully developed in both sexes.

COMMENTS: There are two living sister species of Sciadocerinae , Archiphora patagonica Schmitz in Chile and Sciadocera rufomaculata White in Austalia and New Zealand. Their close relationship is indicated by characters 14 and 15 (table 4): stem of M 1 -M 2 lost or spectral, and the basal flagellomere is enlarged in males (it is much larger in Archiphora ). A Baltic amber (Eocene) species was transferred to its own genus, Hennigophora robusta (Meunier) , by Brown (2007a), into which I am also transferring Archiphora pria Grimaldi and Cumming (see below). Two other genera of sciadocerines occur in Baltic amber: Ulrichophora Brown (monotypic: lobata ), and Eosciadocera Hong (two species). I have not examined Ulrichophora , but the fly has some distinctive features, the most striking being the numerous acrostichals not arranged into one or a few rows ( Brown, 2007a). Eosciadocera setosa and E. pauciseta , n. sp., are striking because of their large size, nearly 7 mm in body length.