A Guide to the Genera of Beetles of South Australia, Part 5

Volume 5 covers suborder Polyphaga: superfamily Tenebrionoidea

From the foreword and introduction:
"It has been necessary to depart from the established sequence of families in the Coleoptera by treating the Tenebrionoidea before the Cucujoidea in the present series of guides. This is because several major families in the latter are out on loan from the Museum collection and it was felt that, rather than delay the continuation of the series for a number of years awaiting the return of material, it would be best to go ahead and produce what, in a strictly phylogenetic sequence, would have been Part 6. The actual Part 6 will deal with the Cucujoidea instead, and where in previous volumes there was a reference to ‘Part 5’ (for instance on Plate 1 of Part 3), this will now have to be emended to Part 6.

A further word is needed on the geographical scope of these guides. It was stated in Part 1 that application cannot be recommended much beyond the borders of South Australia. While this is true of the higher-rainfall zone in the south, the dry Eyrean Province of Australia seems to have a relatively uniform fauna over most of its vast extent. This encompasses areas of less than 250 mm of annual rainfall and includes the greater part of all states except Victoria and Tasmania. It would therefore be correct to see the guides as having a wider scope than implied at the beginning, but mainly with regard to the Eyrean fauna.

The Tenebrionoidea or Heteromera are a natural grouping of 28 families of which 17 occur in South Australia. Two more occur elsewhere in Australia (Chalcodryidae and Prostomidae, mainly in Tasmania) (Lawrence, 1982). However, the dividing line between the Tenebrionoidea and the 25 families of Cucujoidea or Clavicornia, covered in Part 6, is not sharp and it is easy to go astray in any key to this large assemblage. For this reason I have avoided the standard key format for families in both Cucujoidea and Tenebrionoidea and substituted a simple list of characters for each family (Plates 1-3). Any member of that family should in theory agree with every character on the corresponding list, and in some cases it may may be necessary to check every one. The most salient diagnostic features are emphasized in italics, but by themselves they will not be sufficient to identify families in many cases. As always in these guides, full use should be made first of the pictures of whole beetles at the end in order to gain an idea of the general appearance of families and genera."