A new species of the genus Lithostege (Geometridae: Larentiinae) from China

Abstract

Lithostege Hübner [1825] 1816, is a widely distributed and species-rich genus, reported from nearly all continents except Australia, but with the main focus of distribution in the Palaearctic region (African species are only known from the Palaearctic northern areas). Parsons et al. (1999) listed 49 species and 8 subspecies. The updated list of Geometridae of the World (Scoble & Hausmann 2007) mentioned 50 species worldwide, 39 of them with Palaearctic origin. In a recent paper (Lehmann 2011) and a review of Lithostege from the Middle East (Rajaei et al. 2011), two new species from Iran and one from Pakistan have been added. In addition, one species has been synonymized and a subspecies was upgraded to species rank, which did not change the total number of 53 known species.