Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 12 hours ago
Ants are a hugely successful family of eusocial insects with over 14,000 modern species described. They are known from every continent except Antarctica and show a wide range of ecologies. Whilst many of us are familiar with their highly organised social structures and castes, there still remain a lot of public misconceptions about how their societies function.
The evolutionary history of ants is equally as impressive, with roughly as many fossil ant species known as there are of dinosaurs! Since their appearance in the Cretaceous, several early lineages of ants (stem ants) have gone extinct. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Christine Sosiak of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as we explore what some of these stem ants were like and ask how the different groups of ants fared over geological time.
Image: Reconstruction of the 'hell ant' Haidomyrmex scimitarus by Franz Anthony (permission granted).
Website: palaeocast.com/ants
Patreon: patreon.com/c/palaeocast
Ants are a hugely successful family of eusocial insects with over 14,000 modern species described. They are known from every continent except Antarctica and show a wide range of ecologies. Whilst many of us are familiar with their highly organised social structures and castes, there still remain a lot of public misconceptions about how their societies function.
The evolutionary history of ants is equally as impressive, with roughly as many fossil ant species known as there are of dinosaurs! Since their appearance in the Cretaceous, several early lineages of ants (stem ants) have gone extinct. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Christine Sosiak of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as we explore what some of these stem ants were like and ask how the different groups of ants fared over geological time.
Image: Reconstruction of the 'hell ant' Haidomyrmex scimitarus by Franz Anthony (permission granted).
Website: palaeocast.com/ants
Patreon: patreon.com/c/palaeocast
