Taxonomic revision

Compression and amber fossils from various natural history collections were studied. The compression fossils studied belong to seven main deposits: the Florissant Fossil Beds (Florissant, Colorado, USA), the Oeningen deposits (Baden-Württemberg, Germany), the Rott deposits (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany), the Aix-en-Provence deposits (Bouches-du-Rhône, France), the Terrains sannoisiens du Gard deposits (Gard, France), Camoins-les-Bains (Marseille, France) and the Bellver deposits (Lleyda, Spain). The Dominican amber fossils studied derive from deposits found in mines between the cities of Santiago and Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic). One of the Baltic amber fossils derives from the Kaliningrad region (Russia). The locality of the second Baltic amber fossil is unknown.

Abbreviations used are the same as those by Wasbauer & Kimsey [3]. They are defined as follows: LA3, length of third antennal segment and WA3, width of third antennal segment. Measurements of the clypeus are as follow: WC, width of clypeus, measured between the widest points; and LC, maximum height of clypeus. Wing venation terminology follows that of Huber & Sharkey [4]. Pictures were either provided by curators or taken with a Jenoptik camera coupled to a Leica Mz7.5 microscope; line drawings were processed in Adobe Illustrator. The kind of material studied is summarized in Table 1.

Ages according to the Geological Society of America timescale v. 4.0. (http://www.geosociety.org/documents/gsa/timescale/timescl.pdf)

The species treated here were assigned to the family Pompilidae based mainly on wing venation features, which are relatively uniform for the family [5]. All of the specimens studied have a preserved forewing, and most of them have the hindwing also preserved (Table 1). They were placed in the family Pompilidae based on a combination of wing venation character states [5–7]: forewing with ten closed cells, C vein present, 1Rs not directly joining pterostigma, abscissa distad Rs + M from M vein present, veins 2rs-m and 3rs-m present, 2m-cu present, 1cu-a closer to vein 1M than to its junction with Cu vein, 2-Rs vein present; hindwing with distinct claval lobe absent, first abscissa of Cu present, 1A vein absent, 1rs-m crossvein absent, second abscissa of M present, and the veins C+Sc+R+Rs fused basally. Pompilidae shares most of Sharkey & Roy’s [6] wing venation character states with Tiphiidae and Sapygidae, but Tiphiidae have a distinct claval lobe [7] and Sapygidae have a vein 1Rs that joins or is closer to the pterostigma [6]. Additionally, Tiphiidae usually have a cilindrical metasoma and males with spined hypopygium, and in both Tiphiidae and Sapygidae the hind leg femur does not surpass the metasoma.

The acronyms for the collections used in this study are as follows: