Diptera Linnaeus, 1758

BICKEL, DANIEL J., MARTIN, JOHN, AGNIHOTRI, PRIYA & SINGH, HUKAM, 2022, Dolichopodidae (Diptera) from the Eocene amber deposits of Cambay and Kutch Basins, India, Palaeoentomology 5 (5), pp. 475-486 : 476-479

Order Diptera Linnaeus, 1758

Superfamily Empidoidea Latreille, 1804

Family Dolichopodidae Latreille, 1809

The Dolichopodidae are one of five major lineages within the Diptera superfamily Empidoidea (for overviews of the family, see Bickel, 2009 and Grichanov & Brooks, 2017). Recently, the limits of the Dolichopodidae were expanded to include the Microphorinae and Parathalassiinae , both of which had been placed as subfamilies within the previously paraphyletic family Empididae ( Sinclair & Cumming, 2006) . This expanded concept of the Dolichopodidae is referred to as Dolichopodidae sensu lato (i. e., including the subfamilies Microphorinae and Parathalassiinae ) while the Dolichopodidae sensu stricto is equivalent to the more restricted traditional concept of Dolichopodidae .

Both the Microphorinae and Parathalassiinae have plesiomorphic wing, antennal, and male postabdominal characters with respect to the Dolichopodidae s. s. and have a much longer fossil record. These two subfamilies appear to have been diverse in both Cretaceous and Baltic amber ( Cumming & Brooks, 2019; Shamshev & Perkovsky, 2022).

By comparison, Dolichopodidae s. s. do not appear in the fossil record before the Paleogene period (a species described as lower Cretaceous Lebanon amber was apparently mislabeled and is from Baltic amber, see Appendix). What is remarkable here is that by the Eocene the Dolichopodidae s. s. show a high level of taxonomic diversity, with most modern subfamilies in place, and the family is abundant in many Cenozoic ambers (e. g., Baltic, Dominican and Mexican). This apparent rapid radiation is supported by molecular evidence, where mitochondrial and nuclear markers suggest a rapid differentiation of the subfamilies. Lim et al. (2010) found that genera that were difficult to place into subfamilies based on morphological characters were also difficult to place using molecular data.