Rutela tristis Gistel, 1850 incertae sedis

Moore, Matthew R., Jameson, Mary L., Garner, Beulah H., Audibert, Cedric, Smith, Andrew B. T. & Seidel, Matthias, 2017, Synopsis of the pelidnotine scarabs (Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae, Rutelinae, Rutelini) and annotated catalog of the species and subspecies, ZooKeys 666, pp. 1-349 : 1

Rutela tristis Gistel, 1850 incertae sedis

Rutela tristis Gistel, 1850: 381 [original combination].

Distribution.

BRAZIL ( Gistel 1850, Krajcik 2008).

Remarks.

Gistel (1850) provided only a short description of this species in German. He stated that R. tristis is narrower than R. runica . Rutela tristis is black and shiny dorsally with the outer margin of the prothorax yellow. The description indicates that the ventral segments are yellow, in particular the specimen has a yellow sternum and yellow markings on the femora ( Gistel 1850). Catalogs of world Rutelinae omitted R. tristis ( Ohaus 1918, 1934b, Machatschke 1972, 1974). Krajcik (2008), without explanation, listed R. tristis as a probable synonym of Pelidnota terminata Laporte. We think that there is no basis for listing R. tristis in synonymy at this time because its type specimen, and thus the validity of the species, is unknown to us.