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Myrmeciites
''Myrmeciites'' is an extinct form genus of bulldog ants in the subfamily Myrmeciinae of the family Formicidae, which contains three described species and two fossils not placed beyond the genus level. Described in 2006 from Ypresian stage (Early Eocene) deposits, all three of the described species and one unplaced fossil are from British Columbia, Canada, while the second unplaced fossil is from Washington State, USA. These ants were large, with the largest specimens collected reaching . The behaviour of these ants would have been similar to extant Myrmeciinae ants, such as solitary foraging, nesting either in the soil or trees, and leaving no pheromone trail to food sources. Due to the poor preservation of these ants, their phylogenetic position among Myrmeciinae is unclear, and no type species has been designated. These ants are classified as ''incertae sedis'' in Myrmeciinae, but some writers have classified it as ''incertae sedis'' wihin the insect order Hymenoptera. This reclassification however has not been accepted; instead, ''Myrmeciites'' remains in Myrmeciinae.
==History and classification==
Fossils of ''Myrmeciites'' were first studied and described by Bruce Archibald, Stefan Cover and Corrie Moreau of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They published their 2006 description of the form genus (which is a collection of species formally described but cannot be identified to genus level) in an ''Annals of the Entomological Society of America'' journal article. The genus name is a combination of the ant subfamily name "Myrmeciinae" and the Latin suffix "''ites''", meaning "having the nature of", which is commonly used in the naming of fossil taxa. Its phylogenetic position within Myrmeciinae is unclear, due to the incomplete and poor preservation of the collected specimens. The paper that described the form genus included the description of three species, including ''Myrmeciites herculeanus'', ''Myrmeciites(?) goliath'', and ''Myrmeciites(?) tabanifluviensis''.
Archibald and colleagues classified ''Myrmeciites'' as ''incertae sedis'' (Latin for "of uncertain placement") within the ant subfamily Myrmeciinae, as the specimens are too poorly preserved to be assigned to any tribe. However, in a 2008 paper, Cesare Baroni Urbani of the University of Basel, Switzerland, classified ''Myrmeciites'' as ''incertae sedis'' within the insect order Hymenoptera (which comprises the sawflies, wasps, bees and ants) because the critical characters used to identify Myrmeciinae ants, or even the family Formicidae cannot be carried out on ''Myrmeciites''. Despite these comments, a 2012 report by Russian palaeoentomologist Gennady M. Dlussky does not make any comment in regard to Baroni Urbani's views; instead, he accepts the classification of Archibald and colleagues.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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