Fossil Record
Fairyflies are well represented in fossil amber inclusions, copal, and compression fossils. Fossils of fairyflies have been found from the Early Cretaceous up to the Miocene epoch. It is, in fact, the only family of chalcid wasps definitely known to date back to the Cretaceous period.
Paleogene and Neogene fossils of fairyflies were first described in 1901 by Fernand Anatole Meunier. He described fossil fairyflies from Baltic amber, most of them from the Eocene (55 to 37 mya). In 1973, Richard L. Doutt described several species from the Burdigalian (20 to 15 mya) amber of Mexico. In 1983, Csaba Thuróczy described another species from Baltic amber, this time dating to the Oligocene (33 to 23 mya). And in 2011, John T. Huber and Dale Greenwalt described fairyfly fossils from the oil shales of the Kishenehn Formation (Lutetian age) of Montana. These comprised two new genera and six species.
Cretaceous fairyflies are much rarer. In 1975, Carl M. Yoshimoto described four genera of fairyflies from the Cretaceous of Canada. In 2011, John T. Huber and George Poinar, Jr. described the genus Myanmymar from Burmese amber. Dating back to the Upper Albian age (about 100 mya) of the Early Cretaceous, it is the oldest known fairyfly (and chalcid wasp). They are surprisingly very similar to modern genera, though with a greater number of flagellar segments and longer forewing veins. The characteristics of the fossil (taking into account Yoshimoto's earlier discoveries) led them to conclude that fairfylies either may have existed much earlier than Myanmymar, or that they may have diversified rapidly during that time period.
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