Checklists of all described organisms from the Daohugou biota, and insects from the Haifanggou Formation at Haifeng Village (Beipiao City, Liaoning Province) and the ‘Jiulongshan Formation’ at Zhouyingzi Village (Luanping County, Chengde City, Hebei Province), are provided. Fossil insects from the Daohugou biota are summarized, including a total of 760 valid species reported in 396 research papers from 2001 to April, 2021. The heyday of exploration of Daohugou insects has been lasted for a decade from 2006 to 2016 according to the number of published papers.

Anhuihymen medianelongata Huang and Nel, gen. nov. et sp. nov., first accurate Chinese Protohymenidae, is described from the Middle Permian Yinping Formation at Chaohu, Anhui Province, Southern China. This region was under a warm and humid climate and separated from the drier Laurussia by the paleo-Thetys ocean during the Middle Permian. This discovery shows that this group was probably very widely distributed during the Permian, and adapted to very different climates and biotas. It also confirms that our current knowledge on the Permian fossil insects is very fragmentary.

Ambers in China have been described from the various localities of both Cretaceous (e.g., Xixia amber from Henan Province and Jalainur [Zhalainuoer] amber from northeastern Inner Mongolia) and Palaeogene (e.g., Eocene Fushun amber of Liaoning Province and Miocene Zhangpu amber of Fujian Province) ages to date (e.g., Hong, 1981, 2002; Shi et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2014; Azar et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2021). Here we report a new amber locality from the Late Oligocene of Nanning Basin, Guangxi, southern China. The first amber piece was collected by one of the authors (GCZ) on 5 June 2008. In a recent field work in early 2021, we further discovered more than 50 smaller amber pieces, which are reported here.

Mecoptera are commonly known as scorpionflies, as some mecopterans have bulbous genitals that are upturned, resembling the stinger of scorpions. As one of the most ancient holometabolous orders (Kristensen, 1981; Dunford & Somma, 2008), the stem group of mecopterans can be dated back to the early Permian (Rasnitsyn, 2004). Mecopterans play an important role in our understanding of the origin of fleas. Some Mesozoic giant fleas have been suggested to be derived from extinct long-proboscid mecopterans (Huang et al., 2012), and recent phylogenomic evidence has clearly demonstrated that fleas are nested within Mecoptera (Tihelka et al., 2020). Mecoptera are very abundant in the geological past, with more than 700 species and 210 genera placed in 39 families (Novokshonov et al., 2016; Ren et al., 2019; Wang, 2020). Extant faunas are represented by ca. 700 species and 40 genera assigned to 9 families (Bicha, 2018; Wang, 2020).

Mesopsyche Tillyard, 1917 is an extinct genus of Mecoptera belonging to the long-proboscid-bearing Mesopsychidae, an adaptation probably associated with pollination of Mesozoic gymnosperms. Here, we describe two new species, Mesopsyche jinsuoguanensis sp. nov., from the Middle Triassic Tongchuan Formation in Shaanxi Province, and Mesopsyche liaoi sp. nov., from the Upper Triassic Huangshanjie Formation in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. The new discoveries highlight the diversity of the Mesopsyche in the region during the Mesozoic.

We describe the first Chinese Caloneurodea, Sinaspidoneura magnifica nov. gen., nov. sp. from the middle Permian Yinping Formation, in the small family Aspidoneuridae, previously known from two genera and species, one from the latest Carboniferous of France and another from the late early Permian of North America. This discovery shows that this order was more widespread during the Middle Permian than previously supposed, under a great variety of palaeoclimates. This clade is still unknown in the Late Permian, and possibly became extinct because of the crisis of biodiversity that happened at the end of the Middle Permian.

Amphipods are extremely diverse malacostracan crustaceans that have conquered many environments from oceanic abysses to the terrestrial realm. Despite their impressive modern diversity and abundance, they are particularly rare in the fossil record. Herein, we describe the exceptionally preserved Gammaroidorum yooling sp. nov. from the Late Neogene of Xiaobai Formation near Pandao village, Shanxi, China. Due to the limitation of the preservation, namely the non-preservation of setae, we could not establish a precise generic assignment, so used the collective group Gammaroidorum Jarzembowski, Chény, Fang & Wang, 2020. Although there are still doubts on the precise placement of this new species within amphipods, these fossils are important since they represent the first known fossil occurrence of an amphipod in China. Besides, these fossils have an unusual preservation, being almost transparent in most cases, and being most easily seen by reflecting light on the fossil.

Here we describe for the first time the insect (trace) fossils from the lower Eocene Huachong Formation at the Sanshui Basin in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, South China. Three specimens of caddis cases display different morphologies, but all of them are constructed using mainly ostracods. The detrital zircon from a layer below the fossil bed is studied. Our isotopic chronological analyses of the detrital zircons reveal at least four phases of volcanic activities in this area during the Phanerozoic.