Syninclusions of the Eocene winter ant Prenolepis henschei (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) and Germaraphis aphids (Hemiptera: Eriosomatidae) in the Late Eocene Baltic and Rovno ambers: some implications

New Late Eocene Chrysomelidae (Insecta: Coleoptera) from Baltic, Rovno and Danish ambers

“…Instead, he claimed that temperate groups like snake‐flies of the extant families Raphidiidae and Inocelliidae, winter crane flies (Trichoceridae), or aphids (Heie ; Kulicka and Wegierek ) prevail in Baltic amber. High prevalence of temperate taxa is also found for the Baltic amber fauna of ants (Dlussky and Rasnitsyn ; Perkovsky ). Nevertheless, thermophilous insect species do exist in Baltic amber and other succinites, and their presence calls for explanation.…”

“…However, evidence of a geographically independent source of the recently discovered Rovno amber (Perkovsky et al . , , and see below), along with the observed stronger similarity between arthropod assemblages of the Rovno and Danish ambers than between either of these and the amber from Gdańsk Bay (Dlussky and Rasnitsyn ; Perkovsky ), brings us back to Larsson's hypothesis which deserves more attention and thorough testing. The most contrasting differences are features of the well‐studied assemblages of notably temperate aphids in the Baltic and Danish ambers.…”

“…The geographical area of the origin of Baltic amber ( s.s .) is also variously delimited, ranging from all of Russo‐Scandia (Weitschat and Wichard , ) to the exclusively eastern Fenno‐Scandian Upland (Perkovsky ). The suggested palaeoclimate of the source time and area of Baltic amber varies from hot and rather dry (paratropical), when based on the Lutetian (middle Eocene) age as proposed by Weitschat and Wichard (, ), to the equable climate (of lower seasonality, with a warm summer and mild winter) that is compatible with the less warm late Eocene age (Archibald and Farrell ; Dlussky and Rasnitsyn ; Perkovsky et al .…”

“…A similar pattern is characteristic of the more extensively studied and more abundant ants in succinites. A total of 21 ‘Holarctic' species of ants and 19 ‘tropical' species are known from Baltic amber; for Danish amber, the numbers are 7 and 7; and for Rovno amber, they are 11 and 14 (Dlussky and Rasnitsyn ; Perkovsky ). Two more species of leaf beetles belong to Recent tribes of the subfamily Cassidinae with ‘tropical' ranges ( Protanisodera glaesi Quiel, (Anisoderini) and Electrolema baltica Schaufuss (Gonophorini)), and four more species are placed in fossil genera related to Recent ‘tropical' genera ( Taphioporus balticus Moseyko and Kirejtshuk, , Taphioporus rovnoi Moseyko and Perkovsky sp.…”

Microzavaljus, a second extinct genus of pleasing fungus beetles (Coleoptera: Erotylidae) from Bitterfeld Amber

“…Wolfe et al [2016] demonstrated that the source of Bitterfeld amber had much lower paleolatitude than the source of coeval Baltic amber. Our previous studies of ants [Perkovsky, 2011[Perkovsky, , 2016, corethrellids [Baranov et al, 2016], phalacrids and erotylids [Lyubarsky, Perkovsky, 2017a] demonstrated that the share of thermophilous elements in Bitterfeld amber is much higher than in the Baltic one. Tropical Ceratopogoninae are more common in Bitterfeld amber than in Baltic amber as well [Perkovsky, 2017].…”