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Fossil Social Insects

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Encyclopedia of Social Insects

The paleontological history of social insects extends into the Early Cretaceous over 130 million years ago. Insects entombed in amber and rock act as historical portholes revealing origins, extinctions, diversification, and in some cases even behavior [18]. Owing in part to their abundance and ubiquity in some terrestrial environments, ants and termites in particular exhibit a rich fossil record spanning hundreds of described species. (There are more known species of fossil social insect than of dinosaurs.) Fossil specimens also capture ecological interactions that remain hallmarks of some social lineages: instances of predation, mutualistic relationships, parasitism, and insight into the origins of social behavior itself. Taken in aggregate, the rock and amber record illustrates the striking ascent of social lineages over deep time, from fledgling newcomers to numerically dominant ecosystem engineers.

Preservation and the Utility of Fossils

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Phillip Barden

  2. Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA

    Phillip Barden & Michael S. Engel

  3. Division of Entomology, Natural History Museum, and Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Michael S. Engel

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  1. Phillip Barden
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  2. Michael S. Engel
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Correspondence to Phillip Barden .

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  1. University of the West Indies, Department of Life Sciences University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

    Christopher Starr

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Barden, P., Engel, M.S. (2020). Fossil Social Insects. In: Starr, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Insects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90306-4_45-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90306-4_45-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90306-4

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