Cyphopisthes erlangshen C. -B. Wang, 2025

Li, Zechuan & Ballerio, Alberto, 2025, Remarks on the Ceratocanthinae fauna of Guangxi (China) (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea: Hybosoridae), Zootaxa 5711 (2), pp. 258-270 : 266

Cyphopisthes erlangshen C. -B. Wang, 2025

Cyphopisthes erlangshen Wang, 2025: 388 (description and iconography)

Remarks. Wang (2025) described this species on the basis of a single female found on Dayao Mountains (Jinxiu County) in a nest of Hodotermopsis sjostedti (Isoptera: Hodotermopsidae ). The type locality is about 1500 km from the localities above listed for C. dohertyi and the overall morphology of the holotype shows close similarities with the Chinese C. dohertyi specimens described above. Based on the photograph of the spermatheca found in Wang (2025), there seem to be differences in the shape of the spermatheca with the spermatheca here illustrated for C. dohertyi , but in the genus Cyphopisthes the spermatheca is weakly sclerotized ( Ballerio 2000b) and therefore the differences could not be decisive, being possibly due to a deformation of the spermatheca. Wang (2025) in his differential diagnosis writes that the species closest to C. erlangshen are C. minutus Paulian, 1978 , C. wallacei (Pascoe, 1860) , and C. crux (Sharp, 1875) , based on the marginal area sculpturing. The sculpturing of the marginal area is a character difficult to appreciate and its reliability for species delimitation and identification in the genus Cyphopisthes has still to be confirmed. Based on the second’s author unpublished data, the charachers useful for species-level identification in the genus Cyphopishtes are the punctation patterns of head, pronotum and elytra, the presence of humeral lines, the dorsal setation pattern, the dorsal color pattern, the size of dorsal ocular area, presence/absence of wings, and male genitalia features. Based on this, all the three above listed species fall quite apart from C. erlangshen . In particular they differ from C. erlangshen as follows: C. minutus is a small flightless species with a small dorsal ocular area and very impressed dense dorsal punctation, C. wallacei has a distinct dorsal short thick setation, pronotal punctation made of a mixture of horseshoe-shaped punctures and ocellate punctures and the elytral area near elytral suture made of paired longitudinal comma-shaped punctures, finally C. crux has much sparser pronotal and elytral punctation and a different dorsal color pattern, besides lacking the humeral lines. Wang (2025) also writes that the new species is morphologically very similar to the Australian C. descarpentriesi Paulian, 1977 , however the latter has much denser and impressed simple punctation on head disc, and much denser and impressed pronotal and elytral punctation. Actually, based on the current knowledge of Cyphopisthes diversity, the most similar species to C. erlangshen is C. dohertyi , the only differences we could find between these two species, on the basis of the photographs published by Wang (2025), are: the presence of two humeral longitudinal lines on elytra and the lack of ocellate punctures on pronotum.