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Sepulcidae

Extinct family of sawflies

Sepulcidae is an extinct family of stem sawflies in the order Hymenoptera. The family is known primarily from late Mesozoic fossils found in 1968 in Transbaikalia. The insects were distant relatives of modern sawflies and are part of the living superfamily Cephoidea.

The genus Sepulca was identified by Alexandr Pavlovich Rasnitsyn. It was named by his colleague and a science-fiction author Kirill Eskov after fictional entities called sepulki, found in Stanisław Lem's The Star Diaries and Observation on the Spot. The relation to Lem's sepulki is understandable in both Polish and Russian, but their English translation obscures their association with ancient insects as they are translated as Scrupts in English editions of Lem's novels.

01Genera

These 17 genera belong to the family Sepulcidae:

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Sepulcidae, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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