Paleontologists say they have discovered the first fossil of an Australian sawfly species, Baladi warru, found at McGraths Flat in central New South Wales.
Baladi warru lived in Australia during the Miocene period, between 11 and 16 million years ago.
This species belongs to Pergidae, a moderate-sized family of sawflies occurring in the western hemisphere and the Australasian region.
“Despite the name, sawflies are not flies but a type of wasp, with spitfires the most widely recognized group of sawfly species in Australia,” said CSIRO paleontologist Dr. Juanita Rodriguez and colleagues.
“They are called sawflies because they have a saw-like ovipositor that is used to lay eggs, and they could be mistaken as flies because they lack a typical wasp waist.”
“The sawfly family Pergidae includes 441 species, of which 276 are found in the Americas (the majority in South America) and 165 in the Australasian region,” they added.
“Most adult females lay eggs on suitable host plants and larvae feed on plant tissue, often in close aggregations.”
“The Pergidae are part of a large radiation of plant-feeding sawflies comprising more than 7,000 species of early Hymenoptera.”
“There are currently only two known fossil representatives of Pergidae: Fonsecadalia perfectus and Fonsecadalia propinquus.”
The fossil of Baladi warru was found in 2018 at McGraths Flat, a fossil site around 25 km northeast of Gulgong in central New South Wales.
“We looked at the fossil and its morphology and then put this information together with molecular and morphological data from a wide sample of current sawfly species,” Dr. Rodriguez said.
“This helped us decipher the fossil’s placement in the sawfly tree of life.”
“We used the fossil’s age and its placement to establish that sawflies originated in the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago, which means their ancient ancestors lived in Gondwana.”
“When this supercontinent split up, sawflies…
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