Dolichoderinae
Dolichoderinae is a subfamily of ants that includes species such as the Argentine ant, the erratic ant, the odorous house ant, and the cone ant. The subfamily presents a great diversity of species throughout the world, distributed in different biogeographic realms, from the Palearctic, Nearctic, Afrotropical region and Malaysia, to the Middle East, Australian, and Neotropical regions.

fir0002 flagstaffotos [at] gmail.com Canon 20D + Sigma 150mm f/2.8 · GFDL 1.2 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- DolichoderomorphaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 72 million years on record.
The record covers at least 72.2 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 83.6 Mya to 0 Mya.
445 occurrences of Dolichoderinae on record, most of them in the Eocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
445 occurrences- Late Cretaceous1%
- Eocene67%
- Oligocene4%
- Miocene24%
- Plioceneunder 1%
- Pleistoceneunder 1%
- Holocene3%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
25 formations
- Florissant Formation88
- Shanwang Formation19
- Bouldnor Formation · Solent Group15
- Green River Formation10
- Salt Formation8
- Upper Freshwater-Molasse Formation7
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The named rock units Dolichoderinae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. One further formation holds fewer occurrences and is not listed. 266 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Dolichoderinae and its relatives
EoceneWhere Dolichoderinae and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
3,909 taxa- Ctenobethylus goepperti23 sites
- Prenolepis henschei23 sites
- Yantaromyrmex geinitzi22 sites
- Formica flori21 sites
- Gesomyrmex hoernesi19 sites
- Lasius schiefferdeckeri18 sites
- Nylanderia pygmaea16 sites
- Tetraponera simplex14 sites
- Dolichoderus tertiarius12 sites
- Eocamponotus mengei12 sites
- Azteca alpha11 sites
- Pachycondyla succinea11 sites
- Plagiolepis klinsmanni11 sites
- Bradoponera meieri10 sites
- Formicidae10 sites
- Plagiolepis kuenowi10 sites
- Tetraponera ocellata10 sites
- Formica gustawi9 sites
- Gnamptogenys europaea9 sites
- Aphaenogaster mayri8 sites
- Camponotus8 sites
- Dolichoderus8 sites
- Dolichoderus balticus8 sites
- Liometopum miocenicum8 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 147 sites for Dolichoderinae, and this reads all of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
79 references- The Fossil Ants of North America84
- Die Ameisen des baltischen Bernsteins45
- Ants of the Dominican Amber (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) 3. The Subfamily Dolichoderinae32
- The Ants of the Baltic Amber29
- Yantaromyrmex gen. n. – a new ant genus (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) from Late Eocene ambers of Europe23
- Ants of the genus Dolichoderus (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) from the Baltic and Rovno ambers17
- Zhang, 198914
- Novye Vidy murav'ev roda Dolichoderus (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) Pozdneeotsenovykh yantarey Europy13
- Murav'i (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) Rovenskogo yantarya12
- Les insectes fossiles des terrains oligocènes de France11
- A preliminary review of Colombia ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) preserved in copal10
- Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) of Formation Green River and some other middle Eocene deposits of North America9
Each of the 445 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 67 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Dolichoderinae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- fir0002 flagstaffotos [at] gmail.com Canon 20D + Sigma 150mm f/2.8
- Licence
- GFDL 1.2
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Dolichoderinae was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itDolichoderomorpha through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Forel 1878