Titanomyrma
Titanomyrma was the biggest ant that ever lived. Its queens were as long as a grown-up's finger and had wings wider than your hand. It lived millions of years ago, long after the dinosaurs had gone.
When did it live?
How big is it?
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Fun facts
A queen could grow to about 7 centimetres long, bigger than any ant alive today.
Its wings stretched about 16 centimetres from tip to tip, as wide as a small bird.
One queen found in the USA is about the size of a hummingbird.
Its best fossils come from an old lake pit near Messel in Germany.
Most asked questions about Titanomyrma
?What was the biggest ant ever?
Titanomyrma. Its queens were about 7 centimetres long with a 16 centimetre wingspan.
?When did Titanomyrma live?
In the Eocene, roughly 56 to 34 million years ago.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Titanomyrma
- Named by
- Archibald et al., 2011
- Group
- Prehistoric giants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
Where the facts come from
- Titanomyrma (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Ute Kiel. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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