ON THE GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF NEMOGNATHA PLAUMANNI BORCHMANN, 1942 (COLEOPTERA: MELOIDAE): NEW RECORDS FROM VENEZUELA, WITH A 4500 KM RANGE EXTENSION

Nemognatha plaumanni Borchmann, 1942 (Coleoptera: Meloidae: Nemognathinae) was described from a single specimen found in Brazil, and since its description no additional information has been published on the species. During a field survey in Venezuela, we found one individual morphologically assignable to the species. In this note, we report and discuss this finding, which, together with the revision of the entomological collections of the Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum (Hungarian Natural History Museum, HNHM, Budapest, Hungary), the Natural History Museum (NHM, London, UK), and the Museo del Instituto de Zoología Agrícola (MIZA, Maracay, Venezuela), has led us to acknowledge the presence of the species in Venezuela, therefore extending the known distribution range of the species by more than 4500 km. We discuss the possibility that N. plaumanni might in fact correspond to a complex of cryptic species distributed over this vast range, an hypothesis that has to be tested with further field- and lab-work