Cephalotes serratus
Cephalotes serratus is a species of arboreal ant of the genus Cephalotes that has been found preserved in amber. They display the odd shaped head characteristic of gliding ants.

George Poinar Jr · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- CephalotesPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At most 6.7 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 20.45 Mya and 13.82 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
8 occurrences of Cephalotes serratus on record, most of them in the Miocene. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
8 occurrences- Miocene100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Cephalotes serratus and its relatives
MioceneWhere Cephalotes serratus and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
538 taxa- Cephalotes squamosus5 sites
- Anochetus brevidentatus2 sites
- Cephalotes alveolatus2 sites
- Cephalotes caribicus2 sites
- Cephalotes integerrimus2 sites
- Cephalotes jansei2 sites
- Cephalotes obscurus2 sites
- Chimarra (Chimarrita) palaenova2 sites
- Dryinus palaeodominicanus2 sites
- Harpactosphecion sucinum2 sites
- Micromalthus debilis2 sites
- Neomachilellus (Praeneomachilellus) dominicanus2 sites
- Proceratium dominicanum2 sites
- Proceratium poinari2 sites
- Thaumatodryinus miocenicus2 sites
- Ablabesmyia electrohispaniolana1 site
- Acanthognathus poinari1 site
- Acanthostichus hispaniolicus1 site
- Acaricoris robertae1 site
- Aglyptinus poinari1 site
- Aivalykus dominicanus1 site
- Alethaxius1 site
- Allecula1 site
- Alumeda antilliana1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Cephalotes serratus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
3 references- Nine new species and a new genus of Dominican amber ants of the tribe Cephalotini (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)4
- Diversity and adaptation in the ant genus Cephalotes, past and present3
- Poinar, 20111
Each of the 8 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Cephalotes serratus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- George Poinar Jr
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cephalotes serratus was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itCephalotes through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Vierbergen and Scheven 1995)