Wikipedia
Sepulcidae is a family of extinct hymenopteran insects. The family is known primarily from late Mesozoic fossils found in 1968 in Transbaikalia. The insects were distant relatives of modern sawflies.
The first 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.
The genus included three species, as well as a number of sub-species:
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Sepulca
- Sepulca mirabilis
- Sepulca mongolica
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Sepulenia
- Sepulenia syricta
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Prosyntexis
- Prosyntexis gouleti
- Prosyntexis legitima
- Prosyntexis montsecensis