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The family Formicidae belongs to the order Hymenoptera, which also includes sawflies, bees, and wasps. Ants evolved from a lineage within the vespoid wasps. Fossil evidence indicates that ants were present in the Late Jurassic, 150 million years ago. After the rise of flowering plants about 100 million years ago they diversified and assumed ecological dominance around 60 million years ago. In 1966, E. O. Wilson and his colleagues identified the fossil remains of an ant (Sphecomyrma freyi) that lived in the Cretaceous period. The specimen, trapped in amber dating back to more than 80 million years ago, has features of both ants and wasps. Sphecomyrma probably was a ground forager, but some suggest on the basis of groups such as the Leptanillinae and Martialinae, that primitive ants were likely to have been predators underneath the surface of the soil.
During the Cretaceous period, a few species of primitive ants ranged widely on the Laurasian super-continent (the northern hemisphere). They were scarce in comparison to the populations of other insects, representing only approximately 1% of the entire insect population. Ants became dominant after adaptive radiation at the beginning of the Paleogene period. By the Oligocene and Miocene ants had come to represent 20–40% of all insects found in major fossil deposits. Of the species that lived in the Eocene epoch, approximately one in ten genera survive to the present. Genera surviving today comprise 56% of the genera in Baltic amber fossils (early Oligocene), and 92% of the genera in Dominican amber fossils (apparently early Miocene).
Termites, although sometimes called white ants, are not ants. They belong to the order Isoptera. Termites are more closely related to cockroaches and mantids. Termites are eusocial, but differ greatly in the genetics of reproduction. That their social structure is similar to that of ants, is attributed to convergent evolution. Velvet ants look like large ants, but are wingless female wasps. Read more about this topic: Ant
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars, it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
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