Smallest genus of ants

The smallest genus of ant is Nothomyrmecia, which only contains a single species, the extremely primitive dinosaur (dawn) ant Nothomyrmecia macrops, which inhabits the scrub of western and southern Australia. Some entomologists deem it to be a veritable living fossil on account of its primitive form, setting it well apart from other ants, although its closest relatives are the myrmeciid ants.

Officially described in 1934, from two worker specimens housed in the zoological collections of Victoria's National Museum, and first collected in 1931 on a track near Western Australia's Mount Ragged, N. macrops is distinguished by its noticeably large eyes, unusually short wings (which in queens are incapable of sustaining flight), the location of its stridulatory organ (produces chirping sounds) underneath its abdomen rather than on top of it, and by the close morphological similarity of its queens to its ordinary workers. After the 1930s, N. macrops was not reported again for many years; but in 1977 it was formally rediscovered, near Poochera on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula – when, on 22 October, a CSIRO field party collected some workers and dealate queens (ones whose wings had been shed, following fertilisation) while camping there overnight. It is currently categorized as critically endangered by the IUCN.