Wikipedia:Today's featured list/February 26, 2016
Twenty ant subfamilies are currently recognized, of which sixteen contain extant taxa, while four are exclusively fossil. Ants (family Formicidae) first arose during the mid-Cretaceous, more than 100 million years ago, associated with the rise of flowering plants and an increase in forest ground litter. They have come to occupy virtually all major terrestrial habitats, with the exception of tundra and cold ever-wet forests, and are the most species-rich of all social insects, with more than 12,000 described species and many others awaiting description. In volume 1 of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus (1758) described seventeen species of ants (F. rufa pictured), all of which he placed in the single genus Formica. Within a few decades additional genera had been recognized, and this trend continued in the ensuing years, together with the development of a more complex hierarchical classification in which genera were apportioned among subfamilies and tribes. The ant species described by Linnaeus are now dispersed in eleven different genera, belonging to four subfamilies. (Full list...)