Tipula cervina Meigen, 1818 (p. 181)

The identity of this taxon is unclear. The original description is quite detailed and describes a species that does not agree in all points with any of the species currently known from Germany and may thus indeed be a separate species. Meigen (1818) writes that he has two specimens, a male and a female, but only the female specimen is present in the Meigen collection (Mannheims 1964). Mannheims (1964) writes that this type specimen is almost completely destroyed and the few fragments that remain do not allow species identification beyond the assignment to the subgenus Lunatipula. By contrast, Savtshenko (cited in Theowald 1980) considers Tipula cervina as identical to Tipula melanoceros (which belongs to the subgenus Platytipula), but apparently without studying the remaining type material of Tipula cervina. I therefore follow Mannheims (1964) and consider Tipula cervina as a species of the subgenus Lunatipula. Indeed, the description of Tipula cervina is quite similar to Tipula truncata, and Tipula cervina might turn out to be a synonym of that species. Alternatively, Tipula cervina could be a very rare (or now extinct?) species, of which no further specimens have been collected since its first description.