“... and Adam named all the animals.” Genesis 2:20 In the last two decades of the 20th Century, an increasing interest in the global environment and the continuing loss of biological diversity through habitat alteration and destruction led to the 1992 UNESCO Convention on Biological Diversity, held at Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Through this nearly universally ratified convention, each nation on earth undertook to provide a complete an inventory of its respective flora and fauna. This work is offered to contribute to that undertaking. The oldest written documents, cuneiform tablets from Iraq, were lists of the names of animals. The data contained in these volumes encompasses all original and the great majority of subsequent nomenclatural and taxonomic acts for the family of beetles known as jewel beetles, metallic wood-boring beetles, Prachkäfers, etc. There are two families within the superfamily Buprestoidea: the small, primitive Schizopodidae restricted to a small portion of extreme southwestern North America and the large cosmopolitan family Buprestidae. Australian Aborigines believe that until the first men named things, they didn’t exist. The most complete previous modern catalogue of these beetles, now well out of date, is comprised of the six fascicles that composed the two buprestid volumes of the Coleopterorum Catalogus (Obenberger 1926-1937). Much work, many new taxa and many publications have appeared since those volumes, so this catalogue is intended to present a modern synopsis of the family-, genus- and species-group nomenclature for the entire world’s fauna. Differing from the last catalogue and the format of that entire larger work, this catalogue also includes a full bibliography. This large literature list contains not only reference to all original descriptions, but those works that included type-species designations for all genus-group taxa, lectotype designations, distribution and host plant associations and those of regional checklists and previous catalogues. If you do not know the names, the knowledge of things is wasted. If one thing is obvious as this work is published, it is that the classification of these beetles into a stable, higher structure is not yet accomplished. The grand effort of Lacordaire (1857) laid the foundation for all beetle families. For buprestids it was followed by the system of Kerremans (1893a) through various cycles of inflation and contraction until the summary I presented (Bellamy 2003b). Unfortunately there has not been sufficient interest in these beetles by enough well-funded specialists to apply the entire suite of traditional and modern techniques to answer the questions about the number, phylogenetic structure and composition of the higher lineages and categories. New and stirring things are belittled because, if they are not belittled, Following this publication as bound volumes, I hope to create an electronic version, which will be easier and more economical to update, in the same manner that software programs are upgraded. The first such product will be available following a period of review and correction of the hard-bound volumes anticipated to become available after five years.
Biologists will never be sure that they have found and named every last species on earth. |