4 R. W. CROSSKEY 
INTRODUCTION 
THE Rutiliini include the largest and most handsome flies to be found in the Tachini- 
dae, and the brilliant metallic colours and conspicuous patterns of many species 
make them outstandingly attractive insects. The group is not well known outside 
of Australia, where it pre-eminently occurs, and the glinting beauty of the metallic 
forms comes as something of a surprise to the non-specialist accustomed to think of 
the Tachinidae as just about the dullest of the Diptera. 
Because of their showy colouring and flower-loving disposition the Rutiliines were 
among the first Diptera to be collected in Australia, and most of the expeditions of 
the late 18th and early 19th centuries that had touched at ‘New Holland’ (Australia), 
“Van Diemen’s Land’ (Tasmania) or the islands of Melanesia brought back specimens 
that were described by the European naturalists. The most venerable surviving 
example is Fabricius’ type of Rutilia retusa in the Banks collection in London which 
was described in 1775 and was probably collected on one of Captain Cook’s voyages. 
From the writings of the earliest workers on the group it is clear that they were 
much impressed by the wonderful ‘new’ flies coming from Australasia, and this is 
attested by the names—such as imperialis, mirabilis, regalis, splendida—they bestow- 
ed on them. Some of the first describers were not primarily dipterists, and the best 
early work on Rutiliini was produced by the coleopterist Guérin-Méneville (1843). 
By 1850 the rather surprising number of 44 nominal species had been described, and 
a further 40 nominal species were named before the end of the 19th century (mainly 
by Macquart, Walker and Bigot)—many of the names referring to features of the 
colour and marking. 
The Rutiliini are more difficult to classify satisfactorily than would be supposed 
from their obvious appearance, and the fact that the bright colours and bold patterns 
can be relatively easily described has had one definite disadvantage in the systematic 
history of the group: it has tempted later workers to think that they could recognize 
the species described by their predecessors on the basis of the descriptions, without 
recourse to the types. Often this was not so, and both generic and specific nomen- 
clature have been much confounded by the misapplication of names. The Rutiliini 
has also had its share of ‘splitters’, notably Townsend and Enderlein, creating what 
Paramonov (1968 : 351) amusingly called their ‘deluge’ of new genera. The mis- 
identifications and generic splitting, together with the fact that no previous compre- 
hensive study of old types was possible, has long meant that the systematics of 
Rutiliini have been in a bad state—as Paramonov put it we are ‘left with the task 
of solving the riddles’. He himself had made an excellent start on this task, and 
Paramonov’s (1968) posthumously published paper dealing with the genera other 
than Formosia and Rutilia is the best work on Rutiliini that has up to now appeared 
—in a class vastly superior to the superficial splitter’s nightmare produced by 
Enderlein (1936) as a ‘Klassifikation der Rutiliinen’, which Paramonov so rightly 
deplored. Paramonov did not live to complete his projected work, and there was 
therefore no revision up to now of Formosia s.l. and Rutilia s.l1., which together 
constitute about 70% of the Rutiliini. - 
The present paper is an attempt at a new comprehensive classification of the whole 
tribe. The work on which it is based grew gradually and inevitably out of the much 
