The present paper describes a new species of encyrtid wasp, Hambletonia dominicana sp. nov. (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae) from Dominican amber. Diagnostic characters include long antennae that are almost twice the length of the head, the absence of long, coarse, flattened setae on the dorsal apical margin of the pedicel, and an elliptical club subequal in length to that of the funicle. This first described fossil species of Hambletonia provides views of new and possible unique morphological features of encyrtid wasps that existed in the Neotropics during the mid-Tertiary.

The Pliocene era could be the last time when sandfly (Diptera: Psychodidae) species were widespread in Europe. Within the Pliocene, the mid-Pliocene period is an important model period in the investigation of the future effects of anthropogenic climate change. In this study, the mid-Pliocene potential distribution of six Mediterranean sandfly species was modelled based on the M2 mid-Pliocene cold and mid-Pliocene warm paleoclimatic reconstructions. It was found that the cold period’s potential occurrence of sandfly species could be notably more extended than the distribution of the taxa in the warm period. The difference is less expressed in the case of the West Mediterranean species, but it is particularly visible in the circum-Mediterranean and East Mediterranean taxa. It can be concluded that not the changes in the mean annual temperature, but the increase of the precipitation patterns and the wetter climate of the mid-Pliocene warm period resulted in the observed differences. The results imply that the use of mid-Pliocene warming as a model of the present climatic changes can be handled with caution in the performing of biogeographic proxies for vector sandflies related to the anthropogenic climate change.