The origin of tetrapods is one of the key events in vertebrate history. The oldest tetrapod body fossils are Late Devonian (Frasnian–Famennian) in age, most of them consisting of rare isolated bone elements. Here we describe tetrapod remains from two Famennian localities from Belgium: Strud, in the Province of Namur, and Becco, in the Province of Liège. The newly collected material consists of an isolated complete postorbital, fragments of two maxillae, and one putative partial cleithrum, all from Strud, and an almost complete maxilla from Becco. The two incomplete maxillae and cleithrum from Strud, together with the lower jaw previously recorded from this site, closely resemble the genus Ichthyostega, initially described from East Greenland.The postorbital from Strud and the maxilla from Becco do not resemble the genus Ichthyostega. They show several derived anatomical characters allowing their tentative assignment to a whatcheeriid-grade group. The new tetrapod records show that there are at least two tetrapod taxa in Belgium and almost certainly two different tetrapod taxa at Strud. This locality joins the group of Devonian tetrapod-bearing localities yielding more than one tetrapod taxon, confirming that environments favourable to early tetrapod life were often colonized by several tetrapod taxa.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2016
Specimens deposited in Natural History Museum collections are vital for the study of biodiversity, human drivers of biodiversity loss, and other environmental and socioeconomic problems. Despite recent advances in filling our knowledge gaps regarding the myrmecofauna of Cyprus, the island’s biodiversity is considered to be under-sampled. In this article, ant specimens from Cyprus deposited at the Natural History Museums of Crete, the Agricultural University of Athens (Greece), the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève (Switzerland), the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (Belgium), and the Lund University Biological Museum (Sweden) are examined, presenting a total of 163 specimens belonging to 24 species examined. Stigmatomma denticulatum Roger, 1859 (Amblyoponinae), Myrmecina graminicola (Latreille, 1802), Stenamma debile (Foerster, 1850) (Myrmicinae), and Biogeographia 40 (1): a047 Demetriou et al., 20252 Cryptopone ochracea (Mayr, 1855) (Ponerinae) are reported for the first time for the island of Cyprus, raising its known ant diversity from 77 to 81 species, while additional distributional data are given for species with only a handful of distributional records, i.e. Tapinoma festae Emery, 1925 (Dolichoderinae), Aphaenogaster subterraneoides Emery, 1881 (Myrmicinae), and Hypoponera eduardi (Forel, 1894) (Ponerinae.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
