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Timing the Radiations of Leaf Beetles: Hispines on Gingers from Latest Cretaceous to Recent
Peter Wilf,12*
Conrad C. Labandeira,25
W.
John Kress,3
Charles L. Staines,4
Donald M. Windsor,6
Ashley L. Allen,2
Kirk R. Johnson7
Stereotyped feeding damage attributable solely to rolled-leaf
hispine beetles is documented on latest Cretaceous and earlyEocene
ginger leaves from North Dakota and Wyoming. Hispine beetles(6000 extant species) therefore evolved at least 20 million yearsearlier
than suggested by insect body fossils, and their specializedassociations with gingers and ginger relatives are ancient andphylogenetically conservative. The latest Cretaceous presenceof these
relatively derived members of the hyperdiverse leaf-beetleclade
(Chrysomelidae, more than 38,000 species) implies that manyof the
adaptive radiations that account for the present diversityof leaf
beetles occurred during the Late Cretaceous, contemporaneouslywith the
ongoing rapid evolution of their angiosperm hosts.
1 Museum of Paleontology and Department of
Geological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079,
USA.
2 Department of Paleobiology,
3 Department of Botany,
4 Department of Entomology, National Museum of
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA.
5 Department of Entomology, University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742-4454, USA.
6 Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 2072, Balboa-Ancon, Republic of
Panama.
7 Department of Earth and Space Sciences,
Denver Museum of Natural History, Denver, CO 80205, USA.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
pwilf{at}umich.edu
