Vol. 74 
No. i 
PSYCHE 
March, 1967 
THE FIRST MESOZOIC ANTS, 
WITH THE DESCRIPTION OF A NEW SUBFAMILY 
By 
Edward O. Wilson ,' 1 Frank M. Carpenter , 1 
and William L. Brown, Jr . 2 
Introduction 
Our knowledge of the fossil record of the ants, and with it the 
fossil record of the social insects generally, has previously extended 
back only to the Eocene Epoch (Carpenter, 1929, 1930). In the 
Baltic amber and Florissant shales of Oligocene age, and in the 
Sicilian amber of Miocene age, there exists a diverse array of ant 
tribes and genera, many of which still survive today (Emery, 1891 ; 
Wheeler, 1914; Carpenter, 1930). The diversity of this early 
Cenozoic ant fauna has long prompted entomologists to look to the 
Cretaceous for fossils that might link the ants to the non-social 
aculeate wasps and thereby provide a concrete clue concerning the 
time and circumstances of the origin of social life in ants; but until 
now no fossils of ants or any other social insects of Cretaceous age 
have come to light (Bequaert and Carpenter, 1941 ; Emerson, 1965) 
and we have not even had any solid evidence for the existence of 
Hymenoptera Aculeata before the Tertiary. 
There does exist one Upper Cretaceous fossil of possible significance 
to aculeate and thus to ant evolution. This is the hymenopterous 
forewing from Siberia described by Sharov (1957) as Cretavus 
sibiricus t and placed by him in a new family Cretavidae under the 
suborder Aculeata. As Sharov notes, the wing venation of Cretavus 
does resemble that of the bethyloid (or scolioid) wasp family 
Plumariidae, a group that has been mentioned in connection with 
formicid origins. The Cretavus wing is also similar to that of such 
primitive Tiphiidae as Anthobosca (see figures, discussion and refer- 
ences in Brown and Nutting, 1950). But the difficulty with this 
fossil is that we have only the wing, and there is no guarantee that 
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, 
Massachusetts. 
"Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and 
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. 
