This year we have been lucky enough to receive records for 2 new species to the UK – Ectophasia crassipennis & Phasia aurigera. These both…
One of the most difficult problems is how to confirm/verify the identification of photos of flies that look quite like Tachina fera. I’d include in…
I always find that one of the hardest identifications to make from photos is the split between Dexiosoma caninum and the much rarer Dexia vacua.…
Recently I have been working on adding a new species to the British list to our key. Thelyconychia solivaga is a small tachinid that seems…
The genus Phryxe contains a few common species (nemea, vulgaris & heraclei) and a few very rare ones (magnicornis & erythrostoma). The key pulls out…
In the keys to Gonia one of the couplets asks you to consider the shininess of the face but this can be a confusing thing…
For many years Linnaemya picta had been confused with rossica because early workers (e.g. Fonseca) hadn’t tried using the European keys. Since the ‘discovery’ of picta…
In Andersen’s 1996 book “The Siphonini (Diptera: Tachinidae) or Europe” he made several changes to the names of Siphona spp., which have proved a bit…
I always find this species-pair really difficult to split – even when you flip out the male genitalia. The cerci are actually quite distinctive but…
Tachinid Times #26 has some very interesting articles on a few projects around the world to compile DNA phylogenies of tachinids. One such is by…