Acanthocera
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Arthropoda
- Class: Insecta
- Order: Diptera
- Family: Tabanidae
- Genus: Acanthocera
Visual Description
Members of the genus Acanthocera are horse flies within the family Tabanidae. Observations from the TreeOfLife-200M dataset indicate that these flies exhibit distinct morphological features, including specialized antennal structures and wing patterns.[1]
Detailed morphological characterization of the male Acanthocera marginalis reveals specific traits:
- Head: The eyes are contiguous and glabrous, with larger ommatidia on the upper two-thirds and smaller ommatidia on the lower third. The subcallus features whitish pruinosity. The antenna has an orange scape, a pedicel with black setulae, and a postpedicel that is orangish at the base and black distally, with a straight (not curved) dorsal tooth. The proboscis is dark brown and shorter than the head height.[2]
- Thorax and Wings: The thorax is dark brown with two subtle median longitudinal bands of yellow pruinosity and yellow setulae. The wing is hyaline with a dark brown anterior margin covering the costal and subcostal cells, as well as parts of the radial and anterior cubital cells.[2]
Distribution and Research
Acanthocera is a genus of horse flies found in South America.[3] Recent research has expanded the known distribution of species such as A. marginalis, with new records documented in the state of Tocantins, Brazil.[2]
Gallery
References
- 1 2 Dataset view for Animalia / Arthropoda / Insecta / Diptera / Tabanidae / Acanthocera constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- 1 2 3 Lia Pereira Oliveira; Augusto Loureiro Henriques; Tiago Kütter Krolow. New records, descriptions, and redescriptions of male horse flies (Diptera: Tabanidae) in Brazil. EntomoBrasilis. 2023. https://doi.org/10.12741/ebrasilis.v16.e1033.
- ↑ Acanthocera. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthocera. Accessed 2026-07-15.