Platysodes Westwood, 1873

Qiu, Jian-Yue, Xu, Hao & Chen, Li, 2015, Review of the Oriental genus Platysodes Westwood (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Cetoniinae: Cremastocheilini) with a redescription of Platysodes madoni Bourgoin, Zootaxa 4021 (4), pp. 553-564 : 554

Platysodes Westwood, 1873

Platysodes Westwood, 1873: 23 ; Arrow 1910: 199; Schenkling 1921: 357; Paulian 1960: 226; Krikken 1977: 310 (in key); Sakai & Nagai 1998: 161; Yu et al. 1998: 95; Krajčik 1999: 43; Smetana 2006: 300; Legrand & Chew Kea Foo 2010: 89; Krajčik 2012: 213.

Type species. Platysodes verlorenii Westwood, 1873

Diagnosis. The species of Platysodes are distinct and easily recognizable by elongate oval, glabrous, black body; rounded clypeus; extended mentum; simple antenna; suboctagonal pronotum; prominent last spiracle; longitudinally ribbed pygidium; slender, short prolegs. Abdomen with a longitudinal groove in male, while convex in female; last abdominal sternite short in male while longer in female.

Distribution. Oriental Region.

Natural history. Very little is known of the habitat and nothing of the life cycle of the enigmatic species in the genus Platysodes . However, they may be myrmecophilous since the mentum is extremely expanded and the maxillae are sclerotized. These are the same modifications that are seen in other species of Cremastocheilini that are myrmecophilous ( Alpert 1994; Li et al. 2013; Komatsu et al. 2015).

Nomenclature. The date of the genus Platysodes Westwood was cited as 1874 by most authors ( Arrow 1910; Schenkling 1921; Paulian 1960; Yu et al. 1998; Krajčik 1999; Smetana 2006). However, Krikken (1977) indicated that Westwood’s Thesaurus Entomologicus Oxoniensis was published in four parts over two years. Part I includes pages 1–56 and plates 1–10 was published in December 1873. The three other parts were published in 1874. Based on Article 21.5 (International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 1999), works published on different dates are to be treated individually and to have separate publication dates. Therefore the date of description for Platysodes and Platysodes verlorenii , is 1873.