Armaniinae

Armaniinae is subfamily of extinct ant-like hymenopterans known from a series of Cretaceous fossils found in Asia and Africa. It is usually treated as one of the stem-group subfamilies in family Formicidae, although some myrmecologists treat it as a distinct family. A 2007 study analysing petiole and antenna morphology led to the proposal that at least some of the armaniid genera be placed in Sphecomyrminae, although others are unconvinced by the arguments and retain Armaniinae. The subfamily contains seven genera with fourteen described species.

==History and classification== Armaniinae is sometimes treated as the most basal of the Formicidae subfamilies, and classed as a stem-group which is more distant in relation to modern ants than the next stem group, Sphecomyrminae. Alternatively, the group has been treated as "ant-like wasps", and elevated to the rank of family as Armaniidae, and considered as a possible sister group to Formicidae. It has been suggested by Engel and Grimaldi that the group may be paraphyletic. This position is in contrast to the original hypothesis of Russian paleoentomologist Gennady Dlussky, who first described the family. Dlussky considered the group, when erected in 1983, have been an intermediate family bridging the families Scoliidae and the true formicids. In contrast to both the treatment as a separate family and as a distinct subfamily, entomologist E. O. Wilson, in a 1987 paper, suggested that the then known armaniids and Sphecomyrma represented a single species. Wilson, in synonymizing the groups, made the hypothesis that the different described genera were actually fossils of different castes of the same species, with Sphecomyrma freyi being workers, Armania robusta being queens, and "Paleomyrmex" zherichini as the winged males. This view was rejected as new fossils and species were described.