Formiciinae
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| Formicium Fossil range: Eocene |
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Carpenter, 1929
Westwood, 1854
Lutz, 1986
Cockerell, 1920
Lutz, 1986 |
The Formiciinae is a fossil subfamily of ant. The type and only genus is Formicium. The genus Formicium includes at this moment 5 species and is known only from queens and males. Workers were never found. The wingspan of the sexuals is the biggest among ants, both extant and extinct types combined, that have ever been found. The queens have a maximum wingspan of 13 to 15 cm. They were real giants (one of the species is called F. giganteum). Two of the species are known from queens and males, both from an Eocene deposit in Messel, Germany. The others are only known from isolated wings (Britain and USA). It is suspected that more species can be found in Messel and nearby deposits.
The Formicidae family belongs to the order Hymenoptera, which also includes sawflies, bees and wasps. Ants are a lineage derived from within the vespoid wasps. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that ants evolved from vespoids in the mid-Cretaceous period about 120 to 170 million years ago. After the rise of angiosperm plants about 100 million years ago, they diversified and assumed ecological dominance about 60 million years ago.[4][5][6] Several fossils from the Cretaceous are intermediate in form between wasps and ants, adding further evidence for wasp ancestry. Like other Hymenoptera, the genetic system found in ants is haplodiploidy.
In 1966 E. O. Wilson, et al. obtained the first amber fossil remains of an ant (Sphecomyrma freyi) from the Cretaceous era. The specimen was trapped in amber from New Jersey and is more than 80 million years old. This species provides the clearest evidence of a link between modern ants and non-social wasps. Cretaceous ants shared both wasp-like and modern ant-like characteristics.[7]
During the Cretaceous era, only a few species of primitive ants ranged widely on the super-continent Laurasia (the northern hemisphere). They were scarce in comparison to other insects (about only 1%). Ants became dominant after adaptive radiation at the beginning of the Tertiary Period. Of the species extant in the Cretaceous and Eocene eras, only 1 of approximately 10 genera is now extinct. 56% of the genera represented on the Baltic amber fossils (early Oligocene), and 96% of the genera represented in the Dominican amber fossils (apparently early Miocene) still survive today
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