Ampulicidae

Ampulicidae, or cockroach wasps, are a small, primarily tropical family of sphecoid wasps, all of which use various cockroaches as prey for their larvae. They are the most primitive family of sphecoid hunting wasps. They tend to have elongated jaws, pronounced neck-like constrictions behind the head, strongly petiolate abdomens, and deep grooves on the thorax. Many are quite ant-like in appearance, though some are brilliant metallic blue, green, and hot pink.

Ampulicidae

Muhammad Mahdi Karim · GFDL 1.2 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.

On record

Recorded, not inferred
Also called
cockroach waspPBDB
Sits inside
ApoideaPBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta

Time the record covers

At least 92 million years on record.

The record covers at least 113.2 Mya to 20.45 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 119.57 Mya to 15.98 Mya.

Early Cretaceous — about 4 of 10 occurrencesEarly CretaceousLate Cretaceous — about 3 of 10 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 10 occurrencesEocene — about 2 of 10 occurrencesEoceneOligocene — about 0 of 10 occurrencesMiocene — about 1 of 10 occurrencesMiocene122–118 Mya — about 1.0 occurrences118–114 Mya — about 2 occurrences114–111 Mya — about 0.8 occurrences104–100 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences100–97 Mya — about 2 occurrences97–93 Mya — about 1 occurrence39–35 Mya — about 1 occurrence35–32 Mya — about 0.8 occurrences21–17 Mya — about 0.7 occurrences17–14 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences113.2 Mya20.45 Mya122 Mya14 Mya

10 occurrences of Ampulicidae on record, most of them in the Early Cretaceous. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.

When

10 occurrences

These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.

Found in

2 formations

Crato — 7.13°S, 39.70°WShanwang — 36.55°N, 118.71°E

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The named rock units Ampulicidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 5 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Ampulicidae and its relatives

Early Cretaceous

Where Ampulicidae and its relatives were recorded in the Early Cretaceous.

Found in the same rock

664 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 8 sites for Ampulicidae, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.

This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.

Entered from

8 references

Each of the 10 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.

Media and terms

Media content1

Picture of Ampulicidae

Credit
Muhammad Mahdi Karim
Licence
GFDL 1.2
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Ampulicidae was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.

Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.

The description on this site

Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0

This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.

Keep going

What may have been alongside itApoidea through timeFormations of the Early CretaceousThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Shuckard 1840