The family Stenopelmatidae is composed of large, mostly flightless insects resembling crickets (the family Gryllidae). The majority of species are in the New World (esp. the genera Ammopelmatus and Stenopelmatus), but the genera Oryctopus and Sia are Old World groups, each of which is placed in its own subfamily.
The classification and constituency of Stenopelmatidae is an ongoing source of controversy, with different authorities proposing radically different arrangements. Until recently, the majority of researchers appeared to accept a major New World lineage as the subfamily Stenopelmatinae, with smaller Old World lineages and fossil groups also treated as subfamilies.[1] At least one other authority, working exclusively with morphological characters, has instead repeatedly proposed that Stenopelmatidae contains the family Gryllacrididae as a subfamily, and also the entire superfamily Schizodactyloidea, similarly reduced to the rank of subfamily (e.g. [2]), a result explicitly rejected by other researchers.[1] In this morphological classification, the entire historical constituency of Stenopelmatidae is reduced to a single subfamily, with the former subfamilies all reduced to tribal rank.
As such, the majority of classifications have until recently recognized the following groups (with the genus Maxentius only removed from inclusion within the genus Sia in 2021):
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