I recently submitted a book chapter on fossil rove beetles where I had the following footnote:
" One could argue that we have overextended the meaning of “Staphylinidae” since the family is not very well defined and the subfamilies themselves can probably be elevated to the family status."
The editors kindly asked me to remove it from the book chapter because they did not want to open Pandora's box (their expression, not mine).
" One could argue that we have overextended the meaning of “Staphylinidae” since the family is not very well defined and the subfamilies themselves can probably be elevated to the family status."
The editors kindly asked me to remove it from the book chapter because they did not want to open Pandora's box (their expression, not mine).
So instead, I am just going to put it here, on this blog.
Over the last several years more and more ex-families (eg Scydmaeninae) are getting sucked into Staphylinidae and one could argue that Silphidae should be added soon. Have we reached the point where we need to evaluate what Staphylinidae really is and perhaps elevate "Staphylinidae" to a superfamily? Unfortunately, for some people this is a numbers game ("the largest family of animals") and I do not see this happening any time soon.
