South American genus Symmela Erichson, 1835 (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Melolonthinae: Sericini): a further new species from Brazil

In the framework of a systematic revision of the South American Sericini (Pacheco et al. 2020, 2021, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c, 2022d, 2023), the taxonomy of the genus Symmela Erichson, 1835 was recently revised. It is one of six genera of Sericini occurring in South America and includes 27 species so far (Pacheco et al. 2022d). Here, we describe another new species of Symmela from Brazil based on a specimen from the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France (MNHN). It is the first species of Symmela with a uniformly unicolored, yellow body surface.We followed the procedures as outlined in Pacheco et al. (2022d): the diagnostic description was generated au-tomatically from the Mesquite (Maddison and Maddison 2018) character matrix and then manually edited. The male genitalia was dissected and glued to a pointed card and mounted on the same pin as the specimen. Genitalia and habitus of the holotype were photographed using a stereomicroscope Leica DC420C digital camera. The resulting images were subsequently digitally edited on Adobe Photoshop CS3. Abbreviation used in the text for collection depository: MNHN: Museum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France.

Automated summary

In the framework of a systematic revision of the South American Sericini, a new species of Symmela from Brazil was described based on a specimen from the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France.