The fossil record of female sexual ornamentation in Empididae (Diptera: Empidoidea), with description of four new species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Females of the subfamily Empidinae (Diptera: Empididae s.s.) often exhibit sexual ornamentation, an adaptation that, within the animal world at large, is most often associated with males, especially in vertebrates. Ornaments of female Empidinae include: 1) legs with rows of relatively large pennate scales, 2) enlarged and/or darkly pigmented wings and 3) inflated abdominal sacs. Ornamentation makes the females appear larger, a characteristic that may make them appear, albeit deceptively, more fecund, and therefore more attractive to potential mates. Given the rarity of female sexual ornamentation, these flies, particularly those of the tribe Empidini, have become a model system for study of this phenomenon. The family’s fossil record consists of 111 known occurrences including several genera from the middle Jurassic. This fossil record however is dominated by two genera, Empis and Rhamphomyia, which account for nearly 60% of all fossil occurrences. Unfortunately, there has been no fossil record of empidine sexual ornamentation other than pennate leg scales. Herein, we review this fossil record and describe the first empidine fossils, all from the Middle Eocene Kishenehn Formation, with enlarged and/or darkly pigmented wings, Rhamphomyia kitadai sp. nov. and R. brunnipennis sp. nov., and two new species of Rhamphomyia which display pennate leg scales, R. decens sp. nov. and R. pennipes sp. nov. Rhamphomyia enena Cockerell, 1921, the oldest known fossil that exhibits pennate leg scales, is redescribed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".