Ábrahám Levente (szerk.): Válogatott tanulmányok VII. - Natura Somogyiensis 22. (Kaposvár, 2012)
Ábrahám L.: "On the other hand, what is this Eastern aeschnoides?" Morton 1926 - an undescribed Palpares species from the Eastern Mediterranean (Neuroptera: Myrmeleontidae)
78 Natura Somogyiensis At the end of the first half of the 19th century, Rambur’s (1842) monograph was the most detailed checklist, in which Rambur (1842) cited from the work of Illiger in Rossi (1807), but he did not mention the name Myrmeleon aeschnoides as well. It was Hagen (1858) to first use the name of "Myrmeleon aeschnoides" for a species described by Illiger (as "M. aeschnoides Illiger Fn. Etrusc.") occurring in Asia Minor, but he considered it to be conspecific with Palpares libelloides. In one of his later paper Hagen (1860a) affirmed this information on Palpares hispanus Hagen, 1860 and reported that the specimen deposited in "Mus. Berol. " (ZMHB Berlin) was from Asia Minor and it was the synonym of "M libelluloides". Later on Hagen (1860b, 1866) was tenacious of his opinion. Under the name of Palpares aeschnoides he listed the species into a new combination (Hagen 1866), but he emphasized that morphologically it distinguished from the Palpares hispanus and he thought it to be a synonym of Palpares libelloides together with Palpares nordmanni (Kolenati, 1846) reported from the Caucasus Mountains. From this point, several authors referred to this name as a valid taxon. In the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century the name Palpares aeschnoides seemed to cause major misunderstandings among the neuropterologists, especially when they tried to determine the specimens from the Middle East. Brauer (1876), who probably had an insight of Hagen’s work, mentioned three Palpares species (P. libelluloides, P. hispanus, P. aeschnoides) when compiling the checklist of Neuroptera in Europe, but he was not sure that "Palpares Aeschnoides Iliig. ? = libelluloides Dalm. var. Kleinasien" was a valid taxon. McLachlan (1873) studied some ant-lion species described by Rambur (1842) and among them some Palpares species. In his work, the species reported from the Arabian Peninsula by Klug in Ehrenberg (1834) were supposed to be conspecific with the ones from the Mediterranean. He considered Palpares papilionoides (Klug in Ehrenberg, 1834) a local variety of P. libelloides, but on the other hand, in the same monograph, he assumed the species illustrated as "Myrmeleon papilionoides varietas" was conspecific with P. aeschnoides described by Illiger. McLachlan’s (1873) assumptions can later be found in the English neuropterlogical literature. One year later Kolbe (1884) also studied some Palpares specimen collected in the Mediterranean (South of Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor). From taxonomical point of view, he did not distinguish between P. libelloides (as "P. libelluloides") and P. hispanus. He regarded P. libelloides as a variable species occurring in the whole Mediterranean. Therefore he reported P. libelloides not only from Morocco in North Africa, but also from Senegal. He made a remark, however, that the specimen from Senegal differed from P. libelloides known in Dalmatia (Croatia) and Greece, considering the patterns and the size of the wings. Based on the research of Prost (2010) Akoudjin and Michel (2011), we can conclude that the species mentioned above are definitely not conspecific with P. libelloides. Today’s knowledge of species distribution excludes the possibility of the occurrence of P. hispanus in Senegal. Kolbe (1884) regarded the taxon from the eastern half of the Mediterranean ("Brussa und Syrien") as specimen similar to species P. aeschnoides mentioned by Hagen (1860b), but when summarizing his opinion about the taxa he agreed to a revision considering the species of Palpares. In one of his later studies, Hagen (1887) mentioned the name of P. aeschnoides as a synonym of Palpares papilionoides Klug in Ehrenberg, 1834) (as "Myrmeleon papilionoides"). These synonyms later on cannot be found in the neuropterological literature.
