Biogeography and color evolution of jewel damselflies (Odonata: Chlorocyphidae)

Chlorocyphidae, commonly known as jewels, are damselflies characterized by clownesque noses and a wide range of coloration over the body. The current estimation suggests that they are ~27 Mya. They are characterized by an impressive courtship behavior where the male, to attract the female, executes a dance involving all the parts of the body in a sequential way. The family is monophyletic with the genus Cyrano as sister to the rest of the genera in the family. African species are also recovered as monophyletic.
Chlorocyphidae’s distribution extends in Africa and Asia. African species are characterized by the complete absence of coloration on the wings, as opposed to Asian species where different coloration patterns are observed. Those coloration patterns play an important role in courtship and contribute to precopulatory mechanisms of isolation between species. Nevertheless, how and when they have changed through time is still uknown. Also, it is currently hypothesized that the group originated in Southeast Asia before dispersing in the African continent trough a single colonization event. This idea is still to be tested as recently, an 11 Ma fossil closed to African species was collected in Austria, which is out of the current range of the group.
Here we provide a time-calibrated phylogeny of Chlorocyphidae based on Anchored-Hybrid Enrichment data from 112 taxa to reconstruct the ancestral distribution of the group, further understand the drivers of the major diversification events, and shed a light on the evolution of the wing coloration in this family over millions of years.