New sawflies from the mid-Cretaceous Myanmar amber (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Syspastoxyelidae)

ABSTRACT

Many insects have been described from the mid-Cretaceous Myanmar (Burmese) amber in recent years, including about 50 families of wasps. However, only two species of sawfly, Syspastoxyela rhaphidia and Striaexyela longicornis (Syspastoxyelidae), have been described in Myanmar amber, in contrast to more than 100 species of sawflies from the Mesozoic of Kazakhstan and China. Herein, we describe three new taxa of sawflies, Deltoxyela engeli gen. et sp. nov., Syspastoxyela pinguis sp. nov. and Syspastoxyela simpla sp. nov., based on six amber pieces with 21 specimens of sawflies from the mid-Cretaceous Myanmar amber. The new findings suggest that syspastoxyelids were speciose and prosperous in the ecosystem, even though only one family of sawflies, Syspastoxyelidae, has been reported hitherto.

KEYWORDS:

• Mid-Cretaceous
• Myanmar amber
• Syspastoxyelidae
• taxonomy

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Huijia Cao and Hongru Yang for their help in this research. D.R. was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 31730087, 41688103), the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT-17R75), and Project of High-level Teachers in Beijing Municipal Universities (grant no. IDHT20180518); T.P.G. was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 31872277); M.W. was supported by Fundamental Research Funds of CAF (No. CAFYBB2019QB004), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 31702038). The authors declare that there is no competing interests in the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31702038,31730087,31872277,41688103];Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University [IRT-17R75];Project of High-level Teachers in Beijing Municipal Universities [IDHT20180518];Fundamental Research Funds of CAF [CAFYBB2019QB004].