Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 98. (Budapest 2006)

Makranczy, Gy.: Systematics and phylogenetic relationships of the genera in the Carpelimus group (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Oxytelinae)

creasing the time intervals to eventually days, more Euparal should be added, until it covers every object on the slide fully. In some cases, most importantly, when the aedeagus of a unique specimen should be examined or drawn from several aspects, it is preferable to embed the aedeagus in Euparal on a separate plastic slide after dissection. For the reasons of clarity and occasional shifting, it is not good to make drawings from freshly made preparations. Turning the object to provide another orientation after several days will require dissolving the Euparal preparation by adding another drop of medium or solvent. It is inconvenient and potentially damaging to do with all the other objects in the same preparation, because the previously desirable orientations will be destroyed. Objects other than the aedeagus of the male do not require turning once they arc correctly positioned in the preparation. By placing the aedeagus on a separate plastic slide, only the aedcagal preparation needs to be softened for re-orientation. Handling of already made preparations. Dissolving an embedded preparation is easy; a drop of absolute ethyl alcohol added on top of the medium will dissolve the Euparal within a few minutes. It may be necessary to add several other drops of alcohol with intervals of a minute or so until the embedded objects are floating freely. Tips on repairing bad preparations. The most common problem with such preparations is that (1) the objects arc badly positioned or (2) they have internal air bubbles (which make their interior blurry or invisible). In both cases the embedded preparation (or parts of it) must be dissolved. To remove air bubbles, the object should be placed in Euparal Essence, which usually helps getting rid of the bubbles in the course of a few hours to several days depending on the nature of the object and the size of the bubbles. Slide preparations. For some characters used in the phylogenetic analysis, it was necessary or advantageous to make permanent, full-body preparations on glass microscope slides. The methods and arrangement on the slide were based on the work by HANLEY & As HE (2003), only slightly modified to fit the characteristics of this taxon (boiling of parts in potassium hydroxide avoided, hydrogen peroxide only occasionally used to bleach the cxoskcleton of very strongly sclerotized, dark specimens). Photography and drawing Habitus photographs, scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The photographic material used in this paper came from a variety of sources. Many of the habitus photographs were prepared by the author from multi-layered shots taken with cither Nikon D70 or a Canon EOS1D digital camera using Microptics' Digital Lab system. Some were donated by other specialists or taken at various museums. An attempt was made to use the best available specimens. The different layers, when available, were montaged by hand using Adobe Photoshop 7.0. Dry specimens for SEM photographs were sputter coated for about 5 minutes with gold+palladium (60:40) which produces a layer approximately 35 inn thick, and then studied using a LEO 1550 Field Scanning Electron Emission Microscope. Habitus photographs were prepared using a Microptics ML 1000 Digital Imaging System. Illustrations of structural details. The illustrations one can find in literature of the most important diagnostic details are predominantly line drawings. In a few cases, one can also find SEM images and regular print photography. While the advantage of the SEM photography primarily lies in the great depth of field and clarity for very small objects, providing a great 3-D sense, the pictures often tend to deviate from what is observed on an actual specimen examined with a dissecting microscope. Advantages of illustrations using regular photography are the fidelity of the image to how a worker finds these objects when identifying specimens or making a dissection, but the drawbacks are the shallow depth of field and resulting low clarity. I think that this method should be reserved for docu-