Metabolus thibetanus Moser, 1914

Vitali, Francesco, 2019, Catalogue of the types of the Scarabaeidae in the National Museum of Natural History of Luxembourg (Coleoptera), ZooKeys 814, pp. 95-114 : 97

Metabolus thibetanus Moser, 1914 Figure 2

Metabolus thibetanus Moser, 1914: 71 (type locality: "Poo, Thibet").

Syntype.

Thibet / Poo // Metabolus / thibetanus Mos. / Cotype [handwritten by Moser] // Donateur 944a / J. Moser, / Berlin III.1917 // 2531, 1♂.

Remarks.

This species was described from an unknown number of specimens measuring between 10 and 11 mm in body length. The type locality, Poo, also known as Pu, Pooh or Spuwa, is located at 2,662 m altitude in India, Himachal Pradesh, Kinnaur District. The German tibetologist August Hermann Francke (1870-1930) visited this village in July 1910 ( Francke 1914: 18) and later, he was appointed professor of Tibetan language at Berlin University. In all likelihood, this is the origin of the entomological material, which Moser described in 1914 and donated to the MNHNL in 1917.

Being preoccupied by Metabolus Bonaparte, 1854 ( Aves), Dalla Torre (1912) had substituted the genus Metabolus Fairmaire, 1887 with Pseudosymmachia , but Moser was not aware of this fact.

Current status.

Pseudosymmachia thibetana (Moser, 1914): Krajcik 2012: 229; Bezděk 2016: 274.