''Burmacyrtus'' is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

genus of small-headed flies of uncertain placement. The genus is known from

Upper Cretaceous The Late Cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) is the more recent of two epochs into which the Cretaceous Period is divided in the geologic time scale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous Series. The Cretaceous is named after ''cret ...

fossils in

amber Amber is fossilized tree resin. Examples of it have been appreciated for its color and natural beauty since the Neolithic times, and worked as a gemstone since antiquity."Amber" (2004). In Maxine N. Lurie and Marc Mappen (eds.) ''Encyclopedia ...

from

Myanmar Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar; and also referred to as Burma (the official English name until 1989), is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and has ...

. It contains only one species, ''Burmacyrtus rusmithi''. The genus was originally placed in the family

Acroceridae The Acroceridae are a small family of odd-looking flies. They have a hump-backed appearance with a strikingly small head, generally with a long proboscis for accessing nectar. They are rare and not widely known. The most frequently applied common ...

, though it was later reassessed and considered not to be an acrocerid. Instead, it could possibly be a stem group acrocerid or placed in Heterodactyla (a proposed clade of flies uniting

Asiloidea The Asiloidea comprise a very large Taxonomic rank, superfamily insects in the order fly, Diptera, the true fly, flies. It has a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring worldwide. It includes the family Bombyliidae, the bee flies, which are parasitoi ...

and Eremoneura). The generic name is a combination of "Burma" (another name for Myanmar) and '' Cyrtus'', an extant genus. The species is named in honor of R.D.A. Ru Smith, who donated the holotype to the

AMNH The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interco ...

from his personal collection.

References

† A dagger, obelisk, or obelus is a typographical mark that usually indicates a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. The symbol is also used to indicate death (of people) or extinction (of species or languages). It is one of the mo ...

Prehistoric Diptera genera

Late Cretaceous insects Burmese amber Monotypic prehistoric insect genera {{Nemestrinoidea-stub