In such cases molecular methods like DNA sequencing provide a useful option to determine even difficult specimens. In previous years it was shown that the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase I (coI) gene is an appropriate marker to identify forensically important fly species [27–31]. This universal gene is also taken advantage of by DNA barcoding, where so called ‘‘universal primers’’ are used for investigating a standard sequence in all organisms [32]. We chose these to obtain sequence data for this study on L. silvarum.