Chimalfus and Liracoxa (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Staphylininae), two new genera from southern south America with a geometric morphometric evaluation of head and pronotal chaetotaxy

Based on the ongoing phylogenetic study of the subtribe Amblyopinina, two new genera are described, Chimalfus gen. nov. and Liracoxa gen. nov. to accommodate three species earlier misplaced in the genus Sphingoquedius . The resulting new combinations are Chimalfus brevis (Sáiz, 1971) comb. nov. , Chimalfus discoideus (Fairmaire and Germain, 1862) comb. nov. , and Liracoxa nana (Sáiz, 1971) comb. nov. Furthermore, a new species, Chimalfus brunneus sp. nov. , is described. For each species, taxonomic descriptions, illustrations, distributions, and bionomics are provided. Geometric morphometric analysis identified morphologically significant traits for the delimitation of all revised and new species. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and procrustes ANOVA offered an effective overview of all traits, highlighting key morphological characters for species delimitation. The analyses revealed that the chaetotaxy of the head and pronotum was significant for species delimitation. This knowledge, as well as the methodical workflow employed in this study, may be applied in future taxonomic work in the more species-rich genera of Amblyopinina.