Abstract
Through the ongoing research on Burmese amber, our knowledge about mid-Cretaceous life on an island in the Tethys ocean continuingly increases (Ross, 2019, 2020; Westerwheel et al., 2019), a life that was exotic and highly endemic (Zhang, 2018; Rasnitsyn & Öhm-Kühnle, 2018a). Among its rich biota is the extinct, strictly Cretaceous family Serphitidae of the Hymenoptera, which still is underexplored. Serphitidae are known in Burmese amber in two subfamilies, one of them (Supraserphitinae) is confined exclusively to Burmese amber and recorded just with one genus and, before the present study, two species (Rasnitsyn & Öhm-Kühnle, 2018b, c). Another subfamily, Serphitinae, is known from three genera, with the type genus Serphites Brues, 1937 (Engel, 2015), which is the most diverse serphitid genus in other Cretaceous ambers and most likely in Burmese amber as well. While the description of Burmese Serphitinae needs to be reserved for our future research, the present work is devoted to the recently described genus Supraserphites Rasnitsyn & Öhm-Kühnle, 2018, the only one in the subfamily Supraserphitinae. We are adding two new species to this genus, hereby doubling its numbers.
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