Euclemensia woodiella
| Manchester tinea | |
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| Manchester moth, painted by John Curtis | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Class: | Insecta |
| Order: | Lepidoptera |
| Family: | Cosmopterigidae |
| Genus: | Euclemensia |
| Species: | E. woodiella |
| Binomial name | |
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Euclemensia woodiella (Curtis, 1830) |
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| Synonyms | |
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Euclemensia woodiella, the Manchester tinea (or Manchester moth, since it does not belong to the Tineoidea), is a yellow and brown British moth known by only three of examples, one of which is held by the Manchester Museum, one by the Natural History Museum, London, and the type, which is in the Curtis Collection at Museum Victoria.
At first placed in Pancalia or Schiffermuelleria, in 1864 it was separated in a monotypic genus Hamadryas by Clemens. However, his proposed genus name had already been used in 1806, when J. Hübner gave it to the cracker butterflies; Clemens' name was thus a junior homonym and invalid. To replace it, A.R. Grote in 1878 erected the current genus, Euclemensia, honoring Clemens' effort. This too was monotypic at first, and while the relationships of the Manchester tinea are now difficult to study in sufficient detail to determine if such a separation is appropriate, it does still indicate that a quite distinct and peculiar lineage was lost with the extinction of this moth.
In 1829 an amateur insect collector named Robert Cribb collected a series of about fifty small yellow and brown moths from a rotting alder on Kersal Moor in Salford, near Manchester. These turned out to be a previously unknown species of moth, but they were mistakenly attributed to a friend of Cribb’s, the collector R. Wood, who had asked the entomologist John Curtis to identify them. The moths were named by Curtis as Pancalia woodiella in Wood's honour.
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