The Helosciomyzidae are a small family of flies found exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere. With the exception of the South American genus Sciogriphoneura, helosciomyzids occur only in Australia and New Zealand (including The Snares and the Auckland Islands).
The Helosciomyzidae are a small family of flies found exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere. With the exception of the South American genus Sciogriphoneura, helosciomyzids occur only in Australia and New Zealand (including The Snares and the Auckland Islands).
==Taxonomy and history== The earliest grouping of helosciomyzid genera was as a subfamily of Sciomyzidae, Helosciomyzinae, proposed by George C. Steyskal in 1965 and which initially consisted of the genera Helosciomyza, Xenosciomyza, and Polytocus, with the monotypic genus Eurotocus added to this grouping by Steyskal in 1978. Helosciomyzinae was elevated to family rank by G. C. D. Griffiths in 1972, including the genera Huttonina and Prosochaeta, which Steyskal had previously classified as belonging to the sciomyzid subfamily Huttoninidae and which were later excluded from Helosciomyzidae in a 1981 revision of the family by Jeffrey K. Barnes. In this same 1981 revision Barnes added five new genera to Helosciomyzidae, with four of these new genera (Cobergius, Dasysciomyza, Napaeosciomyza, and Neosciomyza) including species previously placed in the genus Helosciomyza. The morphological differences between these genera are often minor. A 2012 paper by Australian entomologist David K. McAlpine theorised that Helosciomyzidae is likely most closely related to the sciomyzoid families Dryomyzidae or Helcomyzidae.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).