insectlove:

dailyfossil:

Titanomyrma/Formicium- Giant Ant!

When: Early Eocene ~ 50 Million Years Ago

Where: Good specimens from Germany and Wyoming, simular wings  found in eastern North America and England. 

What:  The genus Titanomyrma (previous name Formicium) contains the largest ants (Formicidae) known; the queens can be up to ~2.5inches (6.3cm) long. For comparison army ants are about 2 inches (5 cm) in length. Not much at all is known about how these ants lived, it’s possible they swarmed like the modern army ant. Most of the fossils are winged queens found in lake deposits (the famous fossil lagerstatten localities of Green River, Wyoming and Messel, Germany). This suggests that these poor things drowned on their first flights out to establish their colonies.

The oldest ant fossils are from the late Cretaceous, and it is thought that they did not start to achieve their modern relative abundance until the Cenozoic - the same time mammals were radiating.  The fossil record for ants is pretty spotty, as is the case for most terrestrial invertebrates. Hard parts are what fossilizes, and when the only thing hard on you is a fragile exoskeleton well… the odds are not good. Thus our knowledge of fossil ants is limited to these large forms and those smaller ones that were unlucky enough to become trapped in amber. 

I am also really amused that they used a humming bird for scale in the photo of the Wyoming fossil pictured above. Did they just happen to have a spare one laying around?

“Oh we need a scale bar for this picture.”

“Scale bars are old news, we’re on the dead bird standard now. Take that, metric system!”