338 TERTIARY INSECTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



CLASTOPTERA Germar. 



It is not a little surprising to find in the Florissant shales a species of this 

 highly specialized form. Apparently the tegmina were not so remarkably 

 convex as in modern types, but the presence of this genus indicates once 

 more how thoroughly the present general features of insect form and struct- 

 ure were established even as early as in Oligocene times. It is the only 

 fossil species known. The genus belongs to the New World, and especially 

 to the tropics, but at least a couple of species are found on our southern 

 Atlantic coast. 



Clastoptera comstocki. 

 PI. 19, Fig. 22. 



The head was mostly concealed under a flake of stone when the drawing 

 for the plate was made, since removed, showing- it to have had a front margin 

 very regularly and very broadly convex, black like the very transverse 

 thorax. The form of the dark, testaceous scutellum is not quite fairly given 

 in the plate ; half as broad at base as the thorax, it is sharply and regularly 

 triangular, almost or quite as long as tlie width of the thorax, and sharply 

 pointed posteriorly. The tegmina are about twice as long as broad, appar- 

 ently nearly flat (wholly flattened on the stone), less than the apical third 

 diaphanous, the remainder semicoriaceous and testaceous, the neuration 

 obscured and even the sutura clavi scarcely perceptible, the clavus appar- 

 ently narrower and less broadly rounded at apex than in our living forms. 



Length to tip of tegmina, 2.8™"; breadth across closed tegmina, 2°"". 



Named for J. Henry Comstock, professor of entomology in Cornell 

 University. 



Florissant, Colorado. One specimen. No. 6655.. 



Order HETEROPTERA. Latreille. 



Of the twenty families into wliieh fossil Heteroptera may be divided 

 only five are remarkable for the abundance of their representation in the 

 existing fauna. These ai-e the Reduviidse, Capsidfe, Lygjeidse, Coreidse, and 

 Pentatomidaj ; and these same families are also well represented among the 

 fossils, containino: togetlier about four-fifths of the total heteropterous fauna. 

 Indeed, the only other family which can be regarded as at all abundant in 

 Tertiary times is the Physapodes, the known species surpassing those of the 



