Abstract

Panorpidae is the largest family of Mecoptera with approximately 500 described species in one extinct and eight extant genera. The phylogeny of Panorpidae was inferred from DNA sequences recently, but has not been comprehensively studied based on morphological characters to date. Here, the phylogeny of Panorpidae was analysed for 155 extant species in eight genera based on 182 morphological characters of adults under Maximum Parsimony and Maximum Likelihood, respectively, with two species of Choristidae and three species of Panorpodidae as outgroups. The resulting phylogenetic trees are overall consistent with those reconstructed in the molecular analyses, and support the monophyly of two major clades and all the extant genera except Panorpa and Neopanorpa, which may need further splitting. A new subfamily, Neopanorpinae subfam.n., is established to include Neopanorpa and Leptopanorpa, with all the other genera assigned to Panorpinae. Thirty-two species groups (24 in Panorpa and eight in Neopanorpa) are recognized. We speculate that Panorpidae likely originated from East Asia, with independent dispersal events that probably occurred at least twice for the Indonesian fauna, five times for the Japanese fauna, twice for the western Palearctic fauna, and four times for the Nearctic fauna.