Abstract

Scolebythidae constitute the smallest family of Aculeata in number of extant species, but with a considerable diversity of extinct lineages. Twenty Cretaceous species are attributed to the family coming from deposits in Canada, Lebanon, Myanmar, New Jersey, and Spain. However, several of these taxa lack characters of the family groundplan. Although phylogenetic investigations have been conducted for the family based on a relatively small set of morphological characters, the substantial diversity of species from Burmese amber have not yet been accounted for in a phylogenetic perspective. In the present work, we reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships of Scolebythidae using a new morphological matrix and explore it through parsimony and Bayesian model evaluation. In Bayesian analyses, homoplasy-based partitioning outperformed anatomy-based partitioning and the unpartitioned models. Our phylogenetic results support the relocation of a few taxa previously attributed to Scolebythidae to the families Bethylidae and Chrysididae. We also describe †Chrysopsenellidae fam. nov., a new family of Chrysidoidea, based on an inclusion in Burmese amber. In all analyses the new family is recovered as closely related to Scolebythidae, with the whole clade being sister-group to Chrysididae + †Chrysobythidae. Finally, we discuss the origin of the Burmese amber biota distinctiveness.