FOSSIL NEMOPTERIDAE (NEUROPTERA ). 1 
By F. M. Carpenter 
Harvard University 
The living members of the neuropterous family Nemopteridae 
have a wide but irregular geographical distribution. Although they 
occur in southern Europe, Asia Minor, India, South America and 
Africa, they have not been found in North America. However, a 
fossil species, Halter americana, was described by Cockerell in 1907 
from the Florissant shales in Colorado. 2 The published description 
of this fossil, unfortunately, was too brief and incomplete to be of use 
to specialists on Nemopteridae. Navas, who subsequently examined 
the type specimen in the British Museum (Natural History), pub- 
lished a new, but very inadequate, account of the fossil in 1913, erected 
a new genus, Marquettia , for it, and included a rough figure of the 
fore wing. The present paper is a more detailed description of the 
specimen, made in connection with my preparation of the insect part 
of the Treatise on Invertebrate Palaeontology. 
I examined the type of americana in the British Museum in 1938, 
and Dr. R. Baker, of the Department of Palaeontology of the Mu- 
seum, has recently sent me a series of excellent photographs of it. A 
second specimen of americana , contained in the Natural History Mu- 
seum of the University of Colorado, has been loaned to me for study 
by the director of the Museum, Dr. Hugo Rodeck; it has added some 
significant features to our knowledge of the species. I have taken this 
occasion to discuss briefly the nemopterid Olivierina metzeli, which 
Pierce and Kirkby have recently described from an Oligocene deposit 
in Montana. 
Unfortunately, the generic classification of the living Nemopteridae 
is far from satisfactory. Navas’ two revisional studies were published 
nearly fifty years ago (1910, 1912), and the generic classification in- 
cluded there was mainly an arbitrary one. The genera were based 
almost entirely upon the shapes of the hind wings, without regard to 
the probably occurrence of convergence in several lines of evolution. 
The venation of the fore wing is surprisingly constant throughout the 
entire group with the exception of a very few species in which the 
Tublished with the aid of a grant from the Museum of Comparative Zoology 
at Harvard College. 
This fossil naturally aroused much interest. It was selected by the editors 
of the Entomological News (19:34, 1908) as the most remarkable insect made 
known during the year 1907, and it was reproduced on the cover of the 
issues of the News for 1908. 
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