Berothidae
The Berothidae are a family of winged insects of the order Neuroptera. They are known commonly as the beaded lacewings. The family was first named by Anton Handlirsch in 1906. The family consists of 24 genera and 110 living species distributed discontinuously worldwide, mostly in tropical and subtropical regions. Numerous extinct species have also been described. Their ecology is poorly known, but in the species where larval stages have been documented, the larvae are predators of termites.

Lucinda Gibson, Museum Victoria · CC BY 3.0 au · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- beaded lacewingPBDB
- Sits inside
- MantispoideaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 229 million years on record.
The record covers at least 237 Mya to 7.246 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 241.464 Mya to 5.333 Mya.
96 occurrences of Berothidae on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
96 occurrences- Middle Triassic1%
- Late Triassic4%
- Middle Jurassic2%
- Late Jurassic15%
- Early Cretaceous23%
- Late Cretaceous44%
- Eocene10%
- Miocene1%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
18 formations
- Karabastau Formation11
- Escucha Formation6
- Zaza Formation5
- Jiulongshan Formation3
- Raritan Formation · Potomac Group3
- Lulworth Formation2
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The named rock units Berothidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 51 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Berothidae and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Berothidae and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
4,276 taxa- Ampliceps furcitibia6 sites
- Decomposita triocella6 sites
- Liassothrips crassipes6 sites
- Oxycorynoides (Oxycorynoides) similis6 sites
- Perlucipecta liangiae6 sites
- Protoscelis jurassica6 sites
- Protoscelis longicornis6 sites
- Protoscelis nitidicornis6 sites
- Ampliceps dubius5 sites
- Archirhyphus asiaticus5 sites
- Chuanblatta stalosa5 sites
- Codemus alatus5 sites
- Codemus synaptoides5 sites
- Distenorrhinus (Distenorrhinus) pallidirostris5 sites
- Kararhynchus occiduus5 sites
- Orchestina5 sites
- Paramesopsocus adibi5 sites
- Polyanka minuta5 sites
- Probelus (Probelus) longitarsus5 sites
- Procramptonomyia kovalevi5 sites
- Sivis lukashevichiae5 sites
- Ampliceps dentitibia4 sites
- Ampliceps tenuirostris4 sites
- Belonotaris (Arnoldibelus) karatavicus4 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 52 sites for Berothidae, and this reads all of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
38 references- Diverse Neuropterida in Cretaceous amber, with particular reference to the paleofauna of Myanmar (Insecta)12
- New beaded lacewings (Neuroptera: Berothidae) from the mid-Cretaceous of Myanmar with specialized cephalic structures8
- Jurassic beaded lacewings (Insecta: Neuroptera: Berothidae) from Kazakhstan and Mongolia7
- Beaded lacewings (Neuroptera: Berothidae) in amber from the Lower Cretaceous of Spain5
- Fossil Neuroptera from the Lower Cretaceous of Baisa, east Siberia. Part 6. Mesithonidae (Insecta)5
- New representatives of the Neuropterans (Neuroptera) from the Jurassic of the Karatau region5
- One new genus and four new species of beaded lacewings (Neuroptera: Berothidae) from Upper Cretaceous Myanmar amber4
- First fossil larvae of Berothidae (Neuroptera) from Baltic amber, with notes on the biology and termitophily of the family4
- Straight-jawed lacewing larvae (Neuroptera) from Lower Cretaceous Spanish amber, with an account on the known amber diversity of neuropterid immatures3
- An unusual new genus and species of beaded lacewings (Neuroptera: Berothidae) from the mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber3
- Two new species of Sinosmylites Hong (Neuroptera, Berothidae) from the Middle Jurassic of China, with notes on Mesoberothidae3
- A diverse fauna of Neuropterodea in amber from the Cretaceous of New Jersey3
Each of the 96 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 26 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Berothidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Lucinda Gibson, Museum Victoria
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0 au
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Berothidae was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Berothidae”
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itMantispoidea through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Handlirsch 1906