By using the wing vein as the object, a preliminary study on the higher taxa in Chinese Lauxaniidae (Diptera, [JP+1]Lauxanioidea) was conducted by landmark-based geometric morphometric analysis. Fourteen homologous landmarks for the wings of 252 known species of Chinese Lauxaniidae belonging to 20 genera, 2 subfamilies, were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA) and canonical variate analysis (CVA). The results showed that the analysis of the first 3 principal components for the overall species and subfamilies could explain 64.085% of the variation of the veins, while the same analysis for the representative genera could explain 100% of them, indicating that the terminal points of R2+3vein, black short bristles on costa and r-m vein were the sites with high variation degree, and the terminal points of R4+5vein, M1vein and CuA1vein were stable sites. The PCA results of subfamilies revealed that high dispersion was presented on principal component 1 (PC1), and this suggested that the terminal point of the black short bristles was an important characteristic to identify the subfamilies. The CVA results of inter-general revealed a good aggregation in the 4 representative genera and a high dispersion among them, indicating that the landmark method was applicable to identify the genera. This study confirms the feasibility of geometric morphology method in Lauxaniidae classification, and lays a foundation for further relevant research.
