Caradiophyodus is an extinct genus of minute wasps in the superfamily Platygastroidea within the order Hymenoptera. The genus was described in 2023 by George Poinar Jr. and Fernando E. Vega and placed in the monotypic family Caradiophyodidae and is represented by a single species, Caradiophyodus saradae. The fossil was found in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber from northern Myanmar and represents one of the earliest known records of platygastroid wasps.
Caradiophyodus is an extinct genus of minute wasps in the superfamily Platygastroidea within the order Hymenoptera. The genus was described in 2023 by George Poinar Jr. and Fernando E. Vega and placed in the monotypic family Caradiophyodidae and is represented by a single species, Caradiophyodus saradae. The fossil was found in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber from northern Myanmar and represents one of the earliest known records of platygastroid wasps.
== Discovery == The holotype specimen, a female, was recovered from amber deposits in the Noije Bum Summit Site, Hukawng Valley, Kachin State, Myanmar (26°20′N, 96°36′E). The amber has been dated to about 100 million years ago (late Albian to earliest Cenomanian), based on zircon U–Pb radiometric dating. The resin was produced by an Agathis-like conifer (family Araucariaceae) that formed part of a tropical coastal rainforest ecosystem. The amber likely originated in forests fringing estuarine or shallow-marine environments and was later redeposited in coastal sediments.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).