NOTE ON TARS OPH LEBIOPSIS MAY I TILL YARD 
(ODONATA: TARSOPHLEBIIDAE) 
By Lt. Col. F. C. Fraser, I.M.S., Retd. 
Bournemouth, England 
I wish to correct a serious error made by the late Dr. 
R. J. Tillyard when describing his Tarsophlebiopsis mayi 
Tillyard 1 . I am indebted to the Curator of the Sedgwick 
Museum, Cambridge University, for the opportunity of re- 
examining this very interesting fossil wing, an examina- 
tion which convinces me that we are not dealing with a 
fore wing and a hind wing as Tillyard supposed, but with 
the right and left fore wings. Tillyard was no doubt 
swayed by the fact that the impression of the supposed 
hind wing is pigmented whilst that of the fore wing is 
not so; he also based his opinion on what he thought to 
be a greater divergence of the origins of Rii (Mi— ii) and 
IRiii (Ms), a divergence which seems to me to be identical 
in the two impressions. His greatest error, however, is 
his statement that the fossil shows unspecialized anteno- 
dals, which in so archaic a wing is absolutely impossible. 
It was to prove this latter point that I requested a loan 
of the specimen and found after my re-examination that 
the two primary antenodals were indeed present. By 
making careful sketches of the portions of the wing to the 
same scale and then making a combined tracing of the 
two, I found that the various longitudinal veins ran in 
smooth continuation of one another and that they were 
obviously both portions of a forewing, the left and right 
of the insect under examination. Some differences were 
also found in the anal area of the wing, where only two 
cross veins can be seen running between CuA and CuP 
and only four in the cubital space. The slight reticula- 
tion in the distal part of this space shown by Tillyard 
appears to me to be due to foreign matter or artefacts. 
The primary antenodals are the 3rd and 5th from the 
base of the wing. The reticulation posterior to the anal 
vein is of three rows of cells, not a network as shown 
1 1923, Geol. Mag., 60: 146-52, 1 pi., 3 figs. 
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