''Florissantia'' is an extinct

monotypic In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group (taxon) that contains only one immediately subordinate taxon. A monotypic species is one that does not include subspecies or smaller, infraspecific taxa. In the case of genera, the term "unispe ...

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

of planthopper in the dictyopharid subfamily Dictyopharinae. The single species, ''Florissantia elegans,'' was described by

Samuel Hubbard Scudder Samuel Hubbard Scudder (April 13, 1837 – May 17, 1911) was an American entomologist and paleontologist. He was a leading figure in entomology during his lifetime and the founder of insect paleontology in America. In addition to fossil insects ...

(1890) from fossils found in the

Florissant Formation The Florissant Formation is a sedimentary geologic formation outcropping around Florissant, Teller County, Colorado. The formation is noted for the abundant and exceptionally preserved insect and plant fossils that are found in the mudstones an ...

of Colorado.

History and classification

At the time of description, both the

holotype A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of sever ...

and

paratype In zoology and botany, a paratype is a specimen of an organism that helps define what the scientific name of a species and other taxon actually represents, but it is not the holotype (and in botany is also neither an isotype nor a syntype). O ...

of ''F. elegans'' were deposited in the paleoentomology collections at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

, with Samuel Scudder's type description of the genus and species being published in a ''United States Geological Survey of the Territories'' 1890 monograph. Scudder named the

genus ''Florissantia'' after the type locality of Florissant, but did not elaborate on the etymology of the species name ''elegans''. At the time of description Scudder placed the genus into "subfamily Cixiida" of the "family Fulgorina". The family was later elevated to Superfamily treatment as Fulgoroidea encompassing all planthoppers, with subfamily "Cixiida" being elevated to the family status as

Cixiidae The Cixiidae are a family of Fulgoroidea, fulgoroid insects, one of many families commonly known as planthoppers, distributed worldwide and comprising more than 2,000 species from over 150 Genus (biology), genera. The genera are placed into thre ...

. The familial placement of ''Florissantia'' was not reevaluated until Emeljanov (1983) who moved it to the family Dictyopharidae. This placement was further refined by Swedo (2008) who included ''Florissantia'' in the subfamily Dictyopharinae, but noted that tribal placement was unclear due to the characters visible in the fossils.

Distribution and paleoecology

When described, the genus ''Florissantia'' was known from two separate fossils preserved as impressions in fine shales of the

Florissant formation The Florissant Formation is a sedimentary geologic formation outcropping around Florissant, Teller County, Colorado. The formation is noted for the abundant and exceptionally preserved insect and plant fossils that are found in the mudstones an ...

in Colorado. The formation is composed of successive lake deposits resulting from a volcanic debris flow damming a valley. When ''Florissantia'' was described, the Florissant Formation was considered to be

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first epoch (geology), geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and mea ...

in age, based on the flora and fauna preserved. Successive research and fossil descriptions moved the age older and by 1985 the formation had been reassigned to an Oligocene age. Further refinement of the formation's age using radiometric dating of sanidine crystals has resulted in an age of placing the formation in the Priabonian stage of the Late Eocene. The Florissant paleoforest surrounding the lake has been described as similar to modern southeastern North America, with a number of taxa represented that are now found in the subtropics to tropics and confined to the old world. MacGinitie (1953) suggested a warm temperate climate based on the modern

biogeographic Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, ...

relatives of the biota found in the formation. Modern estimates of the paleoelevation range between , notably higher than the original estimates by MacGinitie of . Estimates of the mean annual temperature for the Florissant Formation have been derived from climate leaf analysis multivariate program (CLAMP) analysis and modern forest equivalencies of the paleoflora. The results of the various methods have gaven a mean annual temperature rage between approximately , while the bioclimatic analysis for suggests mean annual precipitation amounts of .

Description

''Florissantia elegans'' adults are long by at the base of the abdomen, with hemelytra almost the same length as the body at . The hemelytra about 3 times as long as wide, with a rounded pterostigma positioned near the middle of the apical half. The wing veins are connected by a series of cross veins positioned near the pterostigma. The legs have longitudinal pale and dark striping, with dark colored spines on the

tibia The tibia (; ), also known as the shinbone or shankbone, is the larger, stronger, and anterior (frontal) of the two bones in the leg below the knee in vertebrates (the other being the fibula, behind and to the outside of the tibia); it connects ...

. Overall the coloration is of a dark tone, with light markings on the abdominal region while the thorax has a punctate texture that changes to a reticulate texture on the scutellum.

References

{{Taxonbar, from1=Q107222345, from2=Q107222350 Florissant Formation † Extinct Hemiptera Eocene insects Fossil taxa described in 1890 Taxa named by Samuel Hubbard Scudder