Formicium is an extinct collective genus of giant ants in the Formicidae subfamily Formiciinae. The genus currently contains three species, Formicium berryi, Formicium brodiei, and Formicium mirabile. All three species were described from Eocene aged sediments.
Formicium is an extinct collective genus of giant ants in the Formicidae subfamily Formiciinae. The genus currently contains three species, Formicium berryi, Formicium brodiei, and Formicium mirabile. All three species were described from Eocene aged sediments.
==History and classification== The collective genus Formicium was first established by English entomologist and archaeologist John O. Westwood in 1854. and originally was only described from isolated fossil forewings, with full queens, drones, and workers being described from Germany later. From 1854 until 2010, the genus was expanded to include five species, however the two German species were subsequently removed and placed in the related genus Titanomyrma as T. giganteum and T. simillimum. The species Formicium mirabile, named by Theodore D. A. Cockerell in 1920, and Formicium brodiei, named by Westwood in 1854, are both known from fore-wings recovered from middle Eocene Bagshot Formation of Bournemouth, Dorset, England. The third species named, Formicium berryi was described by Frank M. Carpenter in 1929 from the middle Eocene Claiborne Formation in Puryear, Tennessee, USA, though he misidentified the formation as the Wilcox Formation. F. berryi was the first described occurrence of the genus and, until 2011, the subfamily, in North America.
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