27 Jan 2015 - Most sources of information about the genus identify 3 species of Thysania: agrippina, zenobia, and pomponia. For the first 2 of these there is a fairly extensive record of images and specimens. Thysania pomponia however is a ghost species. Every internet reference simply records the name: T. pomponia (e.g., Encyclopedia of Life). The index card shown here indicates that the authoritative British Museum of Natural History regards T. pomponia, described by Jordan in 1924, as a currently valid species. I sought the referenced publication and find text for the volumes of Trans. Ent. Soc. London from 1836-1922. The publication name did indeed change from "Trans." to "Proc." For the 1924 volume, maybe I'll have to visit London. Another tack: who was Jordan, who described T. pomponia? Evidently the German entomologist Karl Jordan, who described 2575 species, many Lepidoptera. Whether his determination would bear modern scrutiny is hard to know, unless a pinned moth is somewhere among the 80,000,000 specimens held in the British Natural History Museum (I checked; <5% of the records are online). In my fruitless pursuit of T. pomponia I ran across the text (and beautiful illustrations) of The Macrolepidoptera of the American Faunistic Region (1907), which I can't resist quoting: The giant continent of America, which extends from the eternal snows of the artic polar region further south than any other continent, is better adapted than any other to the production of an inexhaustible wealth of the most varied animal forms ... On Thysania: ... however the western tropical species develop gigantic forms, such as Erebus and before all Thysania agrippina, which has the largest expanse of wings of all the known lepidoptera. -DLC
|
AuthorDavid Cappaert Archives
December 2019
Categories |