No Longer Extinct Orange Headed Corpse Eating Bone-Skipper Flies Given Neotype Designation

Posted on July 7, 2013

Thyreophora cynophila or bone-skipper flies are odd-looking flies with orange heads. Zoologger says the orange heads emit a luminous glow during the winter. LiveScience reports that the bone-skipper flies prefer to eat from bodies in advanced stages of decay and not from fresh carcasses. The flies seek out carcasses where the bones have been partly crushed. The species seemingly vanished 160 years ago. Humans may have helped with the disappearance of the flies as we have been doing a fairly good job of removing animals corpses quickly from fields, thereby removing the bone-skipper's preferred food source.

However, the flies did not actually go extinct. A Thyreophora cynophila was found in Spain in 2010. A report on the once-thought extinct fly was published here in Systematic Entomology.

We report on a sensational find in central Spain of six specimens of Thyreophora cynophila (Panzer, 1798), a colourful, strange-looking piophilid fly living on carcasses of big mammals in advanced stages of decay. Published data suggest that the species is known exclusively from central western Europe (Germany, Austria and France), and was observed last near Paris, France, in the late 1840s, i.e. more than 160 years ago. Accordingly, T. cynophila was placed in 2007 as the only dipteran on a list of recent European animals considered to be globally extinct.

Over the past few years more species of bone-skipper flies have been rediscovered in Europe. The neotype Centrophlebomyia - under which all bone-skipper fly species will be categorized - has been created. A research paper, published in ZooKeys, describes four species that fall under the Centrophlebomyia neotype designation.

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