Ditomus cordatus Dejean, 1825: 441

Serrano, José, 2022, Designation of types of European Harpalini (Coleoptera: Carabidae) described by Dejean and deposited in the MNHN, Paris, Zootaxa 5141 (5), pp. 484-500 : 487-488

Ditomus cordatus Dejean, 1825: 441 .

The specimen here recognized as holotype is a male bearing the labels: “ cordatus m.”, “Hispania”, “ex-Museo Chaudoir” and “ Holotype of Ditomus cordatus Dejean, 1825 desig. by J. Serrano ” .

Dejean (1825) stated Puente del Arzobispo as the sampling locality which is in the westernmost part of the province of Toledo, in the southern Iberian Meseta. There are no details on the number and sex of the studied specimens, possibly because Dejean saw only one beetle. Thus, this specimen is recognized as the holotype of Ditomus cordatus . Its characteristics fully agree with those mentioned in the original description and the current concept of the species ( Fuente, 1927; Antoine, 1959).

In the collection there are other specimens placed besides the holotype but none bear any label indicating that they were used by Dejean when writing the original description, nor show the words “Hispania” “Puente del Arzobispo”, “ cordatus mihi”, etc. The species was placed within the genus Carterus subgenus Tschitscherinellus by Csiki (1906: p. 60). No other taxon was included in this subgenus and thus Carterus cordatus Dejean, 1825 became the type species of the subgenus by monotypy. No criteria were indicated by Csiki to erect the new subgenus. Tschitscherinellus has been ranked either as a subgenus of Carterus (e.g., Csiki, 1906; Fuente, 1927) or Odontocarus (e.g., Antoine, 1959; Machado, 1992), or as genus ( Stichel, 1923). Wrase (1994) considered that Tschitscherinellus has morphological peculiarities that justify its ranking as genus. A key to this species is provided by Wrase (2011: 163).

It currently includes two polytypic species distributed in the Mediterranean and the Levant ( Kataev & Wrase, 2017b).