Among the insects with wings clad in scales, the butterflies are most known and show the greatest variety of scales. In the Diptera, only some families or particular genera of two large groups are known to bear scales on wings, i.e., mosquitoes (Culicomorpha) and moth flies (Psychodomorpha). From among another large dipteran group, the crane-flies (Tipulomorpha), the scales on wings are present only in one small genus, Maietta Alexander, now endemic to the southwestern coast of South America. Herewith, we describe the Eocene ancestor of Maietta, embedded in Baltic amber, Maietta (Hoffeinsetta ) christelae, n. subgen., n. sp. This species and its recent congeners document the evolution of scale cover from scarce, restricted only to the anterior portion of the wing, to complete and dense. A similar parallel evolutionary route was previously described in the Culicidae. The fossil representative of Maietta provides also a further example of biogeographical relationships of Baltic fauna with recent congeners distributed today far from Europe. The present finding prompts a discussion on a possible protective role of scales against sticky surfaces of resin and the same proposes an explanation to a question: why some insects are astonishingly rare in fossil resins; a problem unsolved since 19th century.

Aim: Cladistic biogeography is all about congruence: when individual area cladograms coincide, they result in a general area cladogram that reveals shared history. However, the complexities of the natural world hamper the reconstruction of fully solved biogeographical patterns. Herein, we present SAMBA (Super Area-cladogram after resolving Multiple Biogeographical Ambiguities), a pattern-based method combining supertrees and area cladograms to depict the relationships among areas. We also present a prototypical implementation of SAMBA as a web-based framework named iSAMBA. Location: Global Taxon: Any taxon can be analyzed with SAMBA Methods: SAMBA is based on phylogenetic supertrees, a technique that combines previously calculated phylogenetic trees to produce a general area cladogram representing conciliatory and non-ambiguous patterns of relationships. In our method, the input topologies are individual area cladograms. SAMBA is implemented through a web-based framework named iSAMBA. We analyzed a theoretical and a real scenario to compare SAMBA with Primary BPA, Component Analysis, TAS and Transparent Method. Results: SAMBA produces area cladograms that converge with the actual history of fragmentations of both hypothetical and real scenarios used as examples of implementation of the method. Primary BPA, Component Analysis, TAS and the Transparent Method are much more affected by the "biogeographical noise" (e.g., multiple areas in a single terminal, paralogies and missing areas) than SAMBA. Main conclusions: SAMBA results in more informative general area cladograms than other pattern-based biogeographical methods. SAMBA reveals shared patterns of biotic distribution without generating multiple unreliable area cladograms. The main advantage of SAMBA is the simplicity of using a single technique to extract biogeographical information from individual area cladograms and combine them to depict a non-ambiguous general pattern of relationships among areas.

This paper explores the distributional data of 4,224 Tipulidae (Insecta: Diptera) species to search for endemism patterns in a worldwide scale and to test the extent to which the global patterns of endemism of the group fit into previously proposed regionalization schemes, particularly Wallace’s system and recent revisions of it. Large scale areas of endemism are assessed using the grid-based method implemented in VNDM. VNDM depends on the prior definition of the grid size for analysis, but a criterion for choosing beforehand a particular grid size is not clear. The same holds for the choice of the level of similarity in species composition selected for the calculation of consensus areas. In our study, we developed a methodological approach that helped defining objective criteria for choosing suitable values for these critical variables. Large-scale areas of endemism around the globe are identified and ranked according to endemicity levels: 1—West Palaearctic, 2—Nearctic, 3—East Palaearctic-Oriental, 4—West North America, 5—Australia, 6—Neotropical, 7—Sub-Saharan Africa, 8—Palaearctic, and 9—Middle East. Our main conclusion is that there are still some limitations in applying biogeographical classifications proposed mostly on the basis of vertebrate distribution to other taxonomic groups, such as the Tipulidae. While there is a general congruence of the broad-scale areas of endemism of tipulids with previously proposed regionalization schemes, for some areas, the sharpness of boundaries between traditional regions is not so acute, due to a great level of overlap of part of its biotic elements.