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Is there a key to the West Palaearctic species of Ulidia Mg? I have a specimen, which is for sure not E. erythrocephala or U. apicalis.

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Seguy (1934 Faune de France) has a key for Ulidia including apicalis, nigripennis, parallela, erythrophthalma and semiopaca. I don't know which of these names are still valid, or whether there are other species (or synonymies). If you would like a copy I can e-mail you images of the relevant pages.

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Dear Ruud,

Not from the Netherlands I assume?
You have an image of the specimen?

John

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Ulidiidae were formerly Otitidae (now an obsolete name) if this helps.
Robert

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No, from Turkey.

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MMM, time for a silly question again: Did the name Otitidae become obsolete????Or does this only counts for the `Ulidiidae`, which then belonged in the past to the Otitidae?

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Hi Ruud,

thanks!
No the Otitidae were treated as a separate family, previously.
Nowadays it is treated as a subfamily within the Ulidiidae.
But I do not know what the reasons were for this transfer.
So now you have the family Ulidiidae, with two subfamilies: Ulidiinae and Otitinae.

John

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A few years out of dipterology and your knowledge is already outdated. It is shocking. Nevertheless, thank you, John!

BTW, whose idea was it to make Otitinae out of Otitidae?

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Hi Ruud,

You're welcome!
Regarding the idea around Otitinae, it's not that you just make a new name, in this case the status of teh familyname Otitidae just degraded to subfamily and therefore the 'uitgang' ~nae in stead of ~dae is used.

John

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John, sorry, maybe my sarcasm was not clear enough. I just was curious, who had the idea to degrade it. No so much is being published on Otitidae, you see

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The status of Ulidiidae in the past often was either as separate family or as subfamily of Otitidae. However, since the family name Ulidiidae has priority over Otitidae, that should be the family name if you consider them as one separate family. I should have the reference somewhere but cannot find it now. I think it was something Russian.

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Kameneva & Korneyev (1993, J Ukrainian Ent Soc 1: 65-72) demonstrated that the two groups belonged to the same family, and that the name Ulidiidae had priority. Kameneva is doing much good work on the taxonomy of this family, and published extensive revisions in various genera throughout the 1990s.

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There's no need for making copies; the full volume is available online under a Creative Commons licence! http://www.fauned...eNumerique

(Thanks to pierred for the link to the PDF versions of FdF volume in this thread)