Conocephalus Thunberg, 1815

This cosmopolitan genus comprising more than 160 species is currently divided in ten subgenera, with most of the species belonging to the also cosmopolitan subgenus C. ( Anisoptera) Latreille, 1829. For a long time also X iphidion Serville, 1831 was recognized as subgenus by many authors, and by a few authors still is, but its diagnosis is contradictory and in an important revision of the genus it is treated as a synonym of C. ( Anisoptera) (Pitkin 1980). This has been adopted by OSF (Cigliano et al. 2024 and already in the old OSF). Due to this unclear taxonomic situation, part 7 of the catalog series OSF is originally based on, lists several generic synonyms under a wrong subgenus (Otte 1997b, some corresponding citations needed to be removed in the new OSF to restore the probably correct synonymies). The following four names are here confirmed as synonyms of C. ( Anisoptera):

Xiphidion Serville, 1831, C. ( Neoxiphidion) Karny,1912, C.( Thecoxiphidion) Karny,1912, all three synonymized by Pitkin 1980 with Anisoptera .

Palotta Walker, 1869 and the only species P. inornata Walker, 1869, whose holotype is a nymph, were treated as nomina dubia, although presumably belonging to genus Thyridorhoptrum Rehn & Hebard (Pitkin 1977). Other authors, most recently Otte 1997b, treat the species as synonym of Conocephalus iris (Serville, 1938), which belongs to subgenus C. ( Anisoptera) (Cigliano et al. 2024).