June-0ct.,i92i Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological SocietylOd 



optera, considerably modified through their speciahzed parasitic 

 habits. 



A novel, and at the same time commendable, feature in this 

 Catalogue of North American Coleoptera is the inclusion of fossil 

 forms thus far described (pp. 349-365). This section was con- 

 tributed by Prof. H. F. Wickham, who has made a specialty of 

 the subject for the last decade. It contains 825 species, nine of 

 which, from the Pleistocene, have been identified with living 

 forms. The other 816 extinct species are from the following 

 geologic ages: 4 from the Cretaceous; 129 from the Eocene; 579 

 from the Miocene; i from the Oligocene; 103 from the Pleisto- 

 cene. These fossil remains have been collected from but 14 lo- 

 calities, most of which have yielded very few specimens. In fact, 

 practically all the Miocene forms, or 70 per cent, of the names 

 recorded in the list, were obtained from the celebrated shales of 

 Florissant, Colorado, investigated with so much enthusiasm by 

 Prof. T. D. A. Cockerell during the past fifteen years. It is of 

 further interest that a very large number of these fossil species 

 belong to genera still living nowadays either in the same zoogeo- 

 graphic region or in other parts of the globe ; of 395 genera men- 

 tioned in the list only 91 (or 23%) are regarded as extinct types. 

 If we restrict ourselves to the Miocene fauna of Florissant, the 

 only locality sufficiently well explored to warrant general conclu- 

 sions, we find that 73 (or 22%) of the 318 genera thus far 

 recorded there still have representatives in North America. Only 

 one family, the Paussidae, is not at present found on this conti- 

 nent, being now, with the exception of one South American genus, 

 restricted to the Old World. What is more, these fossils, even 

 from the Cretaceous and the Eocene, can without effort be in- 

 cluded in the families based on living species. It is thus evident 

 that the main lines of evolution in the order Coleoptera have 

 undergone little, if any, change since the end of the Mesozoic 

 times. This, together with the paucity of available data, accounts 

 for the difficulty of using the geological record in connection with 

 a phylogenetic system of classification of the order. Yet the past 

 history of a group should afford the most convincing arguments 

 for its suggested phylogeny. 



The "Bibliography of Taxonomic Coleopterology to January i. 



