A new genus of Ipsviciidae (Hemiptera, Cicadomorpha) with a tegminal strigil from the Triassic of Madygen

Abstract

The family Ipsviciidae, originally described from the Upper Triassic of Australia and considered an offshoot of the Scytinopteridae (Tillyard, 1919), was later variously assigned to Heteroptera, Coleorrhyncha, Fulgoroidea, or Cicadomorpha (Cercopoidea or its own superfamily) by different authors (see Lambkin, 2020). Shcherbakov (1984) placed Ipsviciidae in the Scytinopteroidea and demonstrated that this superfamily is ancestral to Heteroptera (Shcherbakov, 1996). The family comprises several genera known from the Triassic and Lower Jurassic of Australia and Eurasia (Lambkin, 2020). A peculiar monotypic genus of Ipsviciidae with a strigil (stridulatory area) on the underside of the tegmen is described below from the Middle to Upper Triassic (Ladinian–Carnian) of the Madygen Lagerstätte, Central Asia. Such a strigil indicates that the new species possessed a stridulatory device of the forewing-hindleg type, similar to those occurring in the extinct Dysmorphoptilidae (Evans, 1961) and some extant true bugs (see Discussion). Dysmorphoptilids and the new ipsviciid genus may have used these devices to produce alarm signals.