Cleostratini, Bolivar, 1887

Bhaskar, Dhaneesh, Sankararaman, H. & Kasalo, Niko, 2022, Dravidacris annamalaica gen. et sp. nov. a new pygmy unicorn grasshopper (Orthoptera: Tetrigidae) from South India, Zootaxa 5196 (3), pp. 420-432 : 428

The tribe Cleostratini is polyphyletic

The tribe Cleostratini , as defined by Storozhenko (2016) has already been discussed by Silva et al. (2017), who concluded that the taxon is polyphyletic. In the definition proposed by Silva et al. (2017), the tribe is monotypic, including only the nominal genus. The authors observed that the fastigial “horn” is a character by which different genera were grouped and appeared multiple times independently. This can be seen in how the horn of Cleostratus Stål, 1877 is formed, with the bifurcation of the frontal costa placed above the compound eyes ( Silva et al. 2017). There is no doubt that the fastigial horn, defined broadly as per Storozhenko (2016), is a character that arose independently multiple times. However, since the herein described species possesses such a horn, we compare it to other horned taxa to briefly consider its taxonomic placement in a very broad sense. The following overview is a reconsideration of Günther’s (1959, 1974) hypotheses and by no means represents a confident reconstruction of the species’ phylogeny. Although we consider the fastigial horn not as a simple character but as a collection of several characters (width of the scutellum, width of the vertex, position of the bifurcation of frontal costa, length of the fastigial protrusion, length of the medial carina of vertex, the zone above which vertex elongation occurred), and include several more general characters, those still represent just a minor fraction of characters that should be examined for a well-supported cladistic reconstruction, which is beyond the scope of this paper and should be done in the future on a larger dataset.