Taxonomic approach to the Dinera carinifrons species-group(Tachinidae) using different identification methods.

For many years the taxon Dinera carinifrons (Fallen, 1817) was considered to be a single species with a wide trans-Palaearctic distribution. However, Ziegler & Lange (2001) reported the occurrence of two distinct taxa previously confused under this name in the European Alps, and a closely related species was recently described by Zhang & Shima (2006) from China and Japan. So the question arises of how many taxa are actually present in the D. carinifrons species-group? In the two first stages of this study, the partial sequences of the genes 12S+16S rRNA were studied using Bayesian inference (BI) and the morphological data were evaluated by Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). These two alternative methods produced very similar results. The unity of the D. carinifrons species-group and the validity of two species in Europe were supported. Altogether three Palaearctic taxa were confirmed in this group.