British Insects: the Families of Coleoptera
British Insects: the Families of Coleoptera |
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This data set is generated from a DELTA database (Dallwitz 1980; Dallwitz, Paine and Zurcher 1993). The original intention of the ‘British Insects’ suite of packages, of which it forms part, was to present scans of the fine hand-coloured engravings of insects in John Curtis’s British Entomology: illustrations and descriptions of the genera of insects found in Great Britain and Ireland (1824–1840), of which the first 12 volumes (up to 1835) are available to us. For further information on this aspect, see Notes on John Curtis’s British Entomology.
In addition to presenting Curtis’s and other early illustrations, all the ‘British Insects’ subsets incorporate descriptive data organized under the DELTA system, and purport to offer facilities for attempting at least partial identification and for information retrieval, via the interactive program Intkey. The present subset encompasses all the families of British Coleoptera, described via standard morphological and ecological characters. It is unlikely to achieve its objectives satisfactorily at this early stage of development, but in any case the DELTA data (from which updates of the interactive package are easily generated) are readily accessible for improving, correcting and extending.
Family descriptions have been compiled from Unwin’s (1984) key to the British families, and Britton’s (1970) detailed taxonomic descriptions; then greatly improved and extended using Lawrence et al.’s (1999) Intkey package, Beetles of the World. The Strepsiptera, which are generally considered close to the Coleoptera, have here been included as a single taxon and are omitted from the routine identificatory component (although images representing all three British families are presented). To cover inaccessibility of the final two volumes of Curtis, we have resorted to scans from Janson’s (1863: black-and-white) transcriptions; and by including additional illustrations from Rye and Fowler (1890), we are able to exemplify most of the British families with at least one picture.
Curtis’s plates are cited in the Intkey displays of taxon images, and for at least one example in each family, as well as for all the genera and species originally described and illustrated by him in British Entomology, these are accompanied by scans of his text. As well as legends for the illustrations and formal taxonomic descriptions, the latter offer numerous examples of his entertaining, informative and elegantly expressed notes on sources of specimens, morphological interpretations, classificatory methodology, general biology, etc.; see, for example, the accounts of Emus hirtus in the Staphylinidae (B. Ent. 534), of Trox sabulosus in the Trogidae (B. Ent. 574), and of Blaps lethifera in the Tenebrionidae (B. Ent. 148).
The nomenclature was aligned in the first instance with the original checklist of Kloet and Hincks (1945), after which the rather numerous names not listed by them were nearly all tracked down with resort to Janson (1863) and Joy (1932). The resulting list of names, and the family assignments, were subsequently brought into line with Pope’s (1977) update of the Coleoptera component of the Kloet and Hincks Check List. The few names not located are indicated by quotation marks in the Intkey displays of descriptions and images, and the plates involved are presented under the pseudo-taxon ‘Unidentified Images’. Of these, most probably refer to insects which are no longer regarded as ‘British’, but a few may represent names employed by Curtis that have never been authoritatively listed as synonyms (cf. Kloet and Hincks). Family assignments of the insects illustrated have been checked at that level, in effect with reference to the family descriptions in the cited works, by ‘identifying’ the illustrations using the present Intkey package, and also using that of Lawrence et al. (1999). While the illustrations should conform reasonably well to the family assignments, however, checking on the generic and specific identities of the beetles depicted has so far been very limited. While this remains the case, biologists wishing to use the pictures for their own purposes should take the necessary precautions for themselves.