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| Gladiators
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Mantophasma Raptophasma |
Members of the order are wingless even as adults, making them relatively difficult to identify. They resemble praying mantises and other phasmid s. The order was initially described from live specimens found in Namibia (Mantophasma zephyra and M. subsolana) and from a 45-million-year-old specimen of Baltic amber (Raptophasma kerneggeri).
The authors of the paper describing the new order note that "it cannot at present be categorically excluded" that the two Mantophasma specimens are of the same species, with the size difference reflecting sexual dimorphism, but they consider this unlikely, because of the wide geographical separation of the specimens.
The three initial species of Gladiators were classified as follows:
However, additional specimens and genetic studies have produced several new species identifications, including splitting all three of these species into different families:
"Mantophasmatodea: a new insect order with extant members in the Afrotropics", by Klaus-D. Klass, Oliver Zompro, Niels P. Kristensen, and Joachim Adis. Science 296 (24 May 2002), 1456-1459. (This is the paper containing the formal order, genus, and species descriptions.)