A new anaxyelid sawfly (Insecta, Hymenoptera, Siricoidea) in mid-Cretaceous Myanmar amber

A new genus of anaxyelid wood wasps from the mid-Cretaceous and the phylogeny of Anaxyelidae (Hymenoptera)

“…The new genus can be separated from Parasyntexis by the latter's narrower pterostigma, narrower than the length of 2r-rs, and 1M longer than 2M in the hind wing (Kopylov 2019). Orthosyntexis can be distinguished from Sclerosyntexis by the latter's elongate scape, which is 3× longer than wide, and the open cell r in the hind wing (Wang et al 2020). Orthosyntexis differs from the extant genus Syntexis, which has 3Cu longer than 4Cu and 2m-cu 1.5× longer than 1m-cu in the forewing (Rohwer 1915), and from Daosyntexis by 1Rs 3× being longer than 1M and 3rs-m 2× longer than 4M in the forewing (Kopylov et al 2020).…”

“…Recently, the anaxyelid Sclerosyntexis hirsuta was described from a single specimen in Kachin amber (Wang et al 2020). Here, we add two new species, O. elegans and O. thanti, from the same deposit, based on three specimens.…”

“…Indeed, µCT scans of amber-preserved anaxyelids would be critical to look for potential fungal spores carried on adult females or the presence of distinct mycangia. To date, only seven symphytan species have been described in Kachin amber, of which five are syspastoxyelids, one is an anaxyelid, and one is an orussid (Engel et al 2016;Zhang et al 2018Zhang et al , 2020Zheng et al 2019;Wang et al 2020Wang et al , 2021. And eight symphytan specimens have not been described in Kachin amber, of which seven are anaxyelids and one is an orussid (Zhang et al 2018).…”

“…This diversity has been arranged into four subfamilies: Syntexinae Benson, 1935 including S. libocedrii and several fossil species, and three other subfamilies, i.e., Dolichostigmatinae, Kempendajinae and Anaxyelinae, known exclusively from fossils (Rasnitsyn 1968(Rasnitsyn , 1969(Rasnitsyn , 1980(Rasnitsyn , 1990Zhang and Rasnitsyn 2006). To date, 18 genera and 44 species of Anaxyelidae have been described (Rasnitsyn et al 1998;Rasnitsyn and Martínez-Delclòs 2000;Zhang and Rasnitsyn 2006;Ortega-Blanco et al 2008;Kopylov 2018Kopylov , 2019Wang et al 2018;Wang et al 2020: listed in Suppl. material 1).…”

“…material 1). Despite this considerable compression fossil diversity, only two specimens have been described in amber, one from the Early Cretaceous of Spain (Eosyntexis parva Ortega-Blanco, Rasnitsyn & Delclòs, 2008) and the other from the Late Cretaceous of northern Myanmar (Sclerosyntexis hirsuta Wang, Ren, Kopylov & Gao, 2020). In addition, seven undescribed specimens were recorded in Zhang et al (2018).…”