Odontomachus pseudobauri
Odontomachus pseudobauri is an extinct species of ant in the subfamily Ponerinae known from one possibly Miocene fossil found on Hispaniola. O. pseudobauri is one of two species in the ant genus Odontomachus to have been described from fossils found in Dominican amber and is one of a number of Odontomachus species found in the Greater Antilles.
History and classification
Odontomachus pseudobauri is known from a solitary fossil insect which, along with a coleopteran and a dipteran, is an inclusion in a transparent yellow chunk of Dominican amber purchased from an amber dealer in Basel, Switzerland. The amber was produced by the extinct Hymenaea protera, which formerly grew on Hispaniola, across northern South America, and up to southern Mexico. The specimen was collected from an undetermined amber mine in fossil-bearing rocks of the Cordillera Septentrional mountains of northern Dominican Republic. The amber dates from the Burdigalian stage of the Miocene, based on studying the associated fossil foraminifera, and may be as old as the Middle Eocene, based on the associated fossil coccoliths. This age range is due to the host rock being secondary deposits for the amber, and the Miocene as the age range is only the youngest that it might be.At the time of description, the holotype specimen, number "BMNHP-II32", was preserved in the Natural History Museum, London amber collections in London, England. The holotype fossil was first studied by entomologist Maria L. De Andrade of the University of Basle with her 1994 type description of the new species being published in the journal Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Naturkunde. Serie B . The specific epithet pseudobauri is derived from the Greek Latin word pseudo which means "false", and bauri from the modern species Odontomachus bauri.
Based on the head structure, O. pseudobauri was suggested to be part of the O. haematodus species group, closely placed with the species O. bauri. The modern species is found in the Galápagos Islands, tropical regions of South and Central America, and most of the West Indies except the Bahamas and Cuba. O. bauri is one of two modern species found on the island of Hispaniola, and based on the similarities to O. pseudobauri De Andrade suggested the latter species might have been ancestral to the modern species. When first described, O. pseudobauri was one of two Odontomachus species that had been described from fossils. It and Odontomachus spinifer were both described by De Andrade from Dominican amber in the same paper. A third species Odontomachus paleomyagra, the first compression fossil species, was described in 2014 from a worker found in Priabonian age lignite deposits of the Most Basin, Czech Republic.