Kopylov Dmitry S, Rasnitsyn Alexandr P
Institute of Zoology, 93 Al-Farabi Avenue, Almaty 050060, Kazakhstan.
Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 123 Profsoyuznaya Street, Moscow 117647, Russia.
Insects. 2025 Sep 9;16(9):943. doi: 10.3390/insects16090943.
The fossil beds of the Karabastau Formation in southern Kazakhstan, known as the "Jurassic Lake of Karatau", represent one of the richest Lagerstätten for Jurassic insects, with more than 800 described species. This year marks the centenary of the first fossil insect descriptions from Karatau, published by A.V. Martynov in 1925. Among the most prominent insect groups from this locality are the Anaxyelidae, a relict family of siricoid woodwasps. Here we report the first occurrence of the subfamily Syntexinae in Karatau, based on a newly discovered and described genus and species, gen. et sp. nov., from the Galkino locality. This is only the second Jurassic record of Syntexinae globally. We provide a detailed morphological description of the new taxon and compare it with related syntexine genera. In addition, we reassess the current state of the four historically known fossiliferous localities of the Karabastau Formation (Galkino, Mikhailovka, Karabastau, and Chugurchak), all of which were revisited during a 2025 field expedition. A total of 22 anaxyelid species are now known from Karatau, highlighting the site's exceptional paleodiversity. Our findings suggest that the true diversity of Karatau's anaxyelids remains significantly underexplored and underscore the importance of renewed paleontological research in this classic locality.
哈萨克斯坦南部卡拉巴斯套组的化石层，被称为“卡拉套侏罗纪湖”，是侏罗纪昆虫最丰富的化石库之一，已描述的物种超过800种。今年是1925年A.V. 马尔季诺夫发表卡拉套首批昆虫化石描述的一百周年。该地区最著名的昆虫类群之一是钝尾蜂科，这是一类残遗的树蜂科昆虫。在此，我们基于在加尔基诺地区新发现并描述的一个属和一个物种（新属新种），报告钝尾蜂亚科在卡拉套的首次出现。这是全球范围内钝尾蜂亚科仅有的第二条侏罗纪记录。我们对新分类单元进行了详细的形态描述，并将其与相关的钝尾蜂属进行了比较。此外，我们重新评估了卡拉巴斯套组四个历史上已知的化石产地（加尔基诺、米哈伊洛夫卡、卡拉巴斯套和丘古尔恰克）的现状，所有这些产地在2025年的野外考察中都再次进行了勘查。目前已知卡拉套共有22种钝尾蜂科物种，凸显了该地点非凡的古生物多样性。我们的研究结果表明，卡拉套钝尾蜂科的真正多样性仍未得到充分探索，并强调了在这个经典地点重新开展古生物学研究的重要性。
