Neopseustidae is a small family of day and night-flying "archaic bell moths" in the order

Lepidoptera Lepidoptera ( ) or lepidopterans is an order (biology), order of winged insects which includes butterflies and moths. About 180,000 species of the Lepidoptera have been described, representing 10% of the total described species of living organ ...

. They are classified into their own superfamily Neopseustoidea and infraorder Neopseustina. Four genera are known. These primitive moths are restricted to South America and Southeast Asia. Their biology is unknown (Davis 1975; Davis and Nielsen 1980, 1984; Kristensen, 1999). ''Nematocentropus'' appears to be the most primitive genus occurring in

Assam Assam (, , ) is a state in Northeast India, northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra Valley, Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . It is the second largest state in Northeast India, nor ...

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 ...

and

Sichuan Sichuan is a province in Southwestern China, occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau—between the Jinsha River to the west, the Daba Mountains to the north, and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau to the south. Its capital city is Cheng ...

, China. Three species of ''Neopseustis'' are distributed from

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

, whilst ''Synempora andesae'' and three species of '' Apoplania'' occur in southern South America (Kristensen, 1999: 53–54). The morphology of the antennae (Faucheux 2005ab; Faucheux et al., 2006) and the proboscis (Kristensen and Nielsen 1981) has been studied in detail.

References

* * * * *Faucheux, M.J., (2005b). Note brève: Evolution d’un type de sensillaire antennaire dans la famille des Neopseustidae (Lepidoptera: Glossata), la sensille basiconique large et enflée. ''Bulletin de la Société des Sciences Naturelles de l’Ouest de la France'', 27(1). * * *Kristensen, N.P. (1999). The homoneurous Glossata. Ch. 5, pp. 51–64 in Kristensen, N.P. (Ed.). ''Lepidoptera, Moths and Butterflies''. Volume 1: Evolution, Systematics, and Biogeography. Handbuch der Zoologie. Eine Naturgeschichte der Stämme des Tierreiches / Handbook of Zoology. A Natural History of the phyla of the Animal Kingdom. Band / Volume IV Arthropoda: Insecta Teilband / Part 35: 491 pp. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York.

Sources

*''Firefly Encyclopedia of Insects and Spiders'', edited by Christopher O'Toole, , 2002

External links

Tree of Life''Apoplania penai'' Davis and Nielsen, 1984
Moth families {{Neopseustidae-stub