Eutheia bekchievi sp. n. (Coleoptera, Staphylinidae, Scydmaeninae) from Bulgaria.

Forty-one species of the ant-like stone beetle genus Eutheia Stephens, 1830 are known, distributed mostly in the Palaearctic (34 species, Taiwan included), and also Nearctic (3 spp.) and Neotropical (4 spp., exclusively Mesoamerican) regions (Jałoszyński 2014). As nearly all Eutheiini, Eutheia is a rare genus and even Central European species are usually represented in large museum collections by a small number of specimens. A substantial progress has been made in the recent years in the alpha-taxonomic study of East Palaearctic and Neotropical species (Hoshina 2007; Jałoszyński 2004, 2008a, 2008b, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2013; Kurbatov 1990, 1991; O'Keefe 1999). Phylogenetic relationships of Eutheia to other genera of Eutheiini were also recently clarified (Jałoszyński 2014). However, the West Palaearctic region remained largely neglected and the only comprehensive revision is that by Franz (1971), in which several new species are described and most of previously known members of Eutheia are redescribed. Franz (1971) did not include only E. praeclara Normand, 1909 from Tunisia and E. ptinelloides Sahlberg, 1913 from Israel, apparently because the type specimens were not available for study. In this paper a description of a new Palaearctic species of Eutheia is presented, based on a male specimen collected in Bulgaria. This is the first European Eutheia discovered in the past 43 years after the Franz's paper cited above.