Rolf Georg Beutel

Introduction The phylogenetic relationships of the holometabolous orders have largely been clarified in the last two decades, based on single genes (Wiegmann et al., 2009), transcriptomes (Misof et al., 2014) and genomes (Niehuis et al., 2012), but also morphological characters of adults and immature stages (Beutel et al., 2011). The phylogenetic pattern suggested by Hennig (1970) and Kristensen (1991) was largely confirmed.

The cladistic analysis with 63 characters (Table S3x Download (2.64 MB ) Document S1. Figures S1 and S2 and Tables S1–S4Table S3) places †Caputoraptor elegans as sister group to †Alienopterus brachyelytrus in †Alienoptera (Figure S2x Download (2.64 MB ) Document S1. Figures S1 and S2 and Tables S1–S4Figure S2). We retrieve mantises (Mantodea) as the closest relatives of †Alienoptera.

In the present study we describe and analyse for the first time complete beetle body fossils from the Gondwanan Belmont locality of the Late Permian pre-crisis time. During this period, ancestors of the superdiverse modern groups Adephaga and Polyphaga started to emerge, eventually leading to a remarkable diversity explosion in the Triassic and the later Mesozoic. A peculiarity of the Belmont locality is an eruption event that produced a volcanic ash dump.