60 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM vol. los 



have described under the name Edmesopus a group of West Indian 

 beetles — two of which had been described as species of Luperus — that 

 have this character in the male. In the case of the majority of these 

 beetles not only is there the male character of the cut-out middle 

 tibiae, but also there is an abnormality of the antennal joints. All 

 over the world there are Galerucini with queer male antennae, but the 

 combination of these leg and antennal abnormalities in the male serves 

 to make these particular beetles stand out from the bulk of the 

 Galerucini closely resembling them in the female sex, in which the 

 males and females are essentially identical. This paper is an attempt 

 to bring together these beetles and consider their likenesses as well as 

 differences. 



In describing the genus Phyllecthrus , LeConte (1865) states that he 

 took the name from the Dejean (1837, p. 406) catalog. He used 

 Dejean's form, Phyllecthris, in his key in the first mention of the name, 

 but two pages later, in his description of the genus, he used Phyllec- 

 thrus, and subsequently described other species under that spelling, 

 and that form of the name has persisted. LeConte listed the old 

 Olivier species, Galleruca dorsalis Olivier (1808), given under Phyl- 

 lecthris in the Dejean catalog as Phyllecthrus dorsalis, and added 

 Say's Galleruca atriventris, now regarded as a color phase of dorsalis; 

 he also described a smaller species, P. gentilis. In 1868 he added 

 another species, Phyllecthrus nigripennis, now regarded as a color form 

 of gentilis. In 1884 he described Phyllecthrus texanus, which is closely 

 related to gentilis and considered by Horn as a variety of it. All of 

 these species that LeConte described, as weU as the original dorsalis of 

 Olivier and Say's atriventris, have one point in common — the antennae 

 in the male are 10-jointed. 



In 1891 Jacoby described a new genus Luperosoma for an Ecua- 

 dorean species, Luperosoma marginatum. This had thickened an- 

 tennal joints of the normal number (11) in the male. It resembled 

 LeConte's species in the cut-out middle tibiae of the male. Later, 

 Weise (1924) in the Junk catalog, synonymized it with Phyllecthrus. 

 Meanwhile, Horn (1893, 1896) described three species under Phyl- 

 lecthrus, parallelus, schwarzi, and subsulcatus, all with thickened 

 antennal joints, 11 in number, and cut out middle tibiae in the male, 

 as in Jacoby 's genus, Luperosoma. In 1940 I described a group of 

 tiny West Indian beetles, all very closely related to each other, with 

 cut out middle tibiae in the male, as Edmesopus. All but two of these 

 species had abnormal antennal joints in the male, sometimes only 

 thickened, but usually deformed in some way. One of the two that 

 did not have the abnormal antennal joints had a slight difference in the 

 length of the joints in the sexes, and in the other there seemed to be no 

 difference at all, yet both of these species in color and structure were 



