Family Tingupidae Loomis, 1966

Tingupidae Loomis, 1966:227 . Shear, 1969:140; 1972:264; 1981:5­6. Loomis & Schmitt, 1971:128. Peck & Lewis, 1977:49. Hoffman, 1980:135; 1999:253. Kevan, 1983:2967. Gardner, 1986:34. Shear & Hubbard, 1998:86 ­88. Shelley et al., 2000:79.

Diagnosis. Chordeumatida with two pairs of setose angiocoxites on the gonopods; 9th legs reduced to one, two, or three podomeres, coxae without prominate coxites; 10th and 11th legs with coxal glands.

Components. Tingupa Chamberlin, 1910; Buotus Chamberlin, 1940; Blancosoma Shear & Hubbard, 1998 .

Distribution. The Alaskan Panhandle; the Queen Charlotte Islands (QCI), BC, Canada; coastal Oregon; the Sierra Nevada of central California; northern Idaho and western Montana; northwestern Colorado; northern, southwestern, and southeastern Utah; southeastern Arizona; southwestern Illinois to northern Arkansas; and eastern West Virginia to northcentral North Carolina (Fig. 4) (Chamberlin 1910, 1925, 1928, 1940; Chamberlin & Hoffman 1958; Loomis & Schmitt 1971; Shear 1972, 1981, map 1; Shear & Hubbard 1998; Hoffman 1999). Southeastern Utah is based on the obscure record of two females from Devil's Canyon, San Juan County (Chamberlin 1928) that has been missed by previous authors; its generic and specific identities are unknown.

Remarks. Tingupidae, an endemic North American milliped family, was revised by Shear (1981). He and Hoffman (1980) recognized two genera, Tingupa and Buotus, the latter being monotypic and transferred into the family by Shelley (1976) after being misplaced in the order Polyzoniida, family Polyzoniidae (Chamberlin 1940; Chamberlin & Hoffman 1958). Shear and Hubbard (1998) added a second monotypic genus, Blancosoma, and provided a key to the three component genera. Tingupidae is closely related to the monotypic family, Niponiosomatidae Verhoeff, 1941, in Japan, and the two belong to the superfamily Brannerioidea Cook, 1896, suborder Craspedosomatidea Brolemann, 1935, along with eight other families (Shear 2000; Shelley 2003). Shear (1988) maintained both Tingupidae and Niponiosomatidae primarily because of somatic apomorphies of Tingupa (paranota and tergal microsculpture), even though the gonopod structure of Niponiosoma Verhoeff, 1941, is closer to that of Tingupa than those of either Buotus or Blancosoma . However, Blancosoma does not possess these somatic features and thus resembles Niponiosoma . Niponiosomatidae holds taxonomic priority over the more widespread and utilized Tingupidae, so synonymization would have the undesirable consequence of submerging this continental North American taxon under the geographically restricted and little­used Japanese name.