Titanomyrma (Giant ant)

I was recently reminded of the importance of conflict resolution when my housemate and I had such a blazing row that a week later I am still in duck and cover position in the corner of my living room, removing shrapnel from my hair. Like many other fighting homo sapiens, we'd have been wise to learn from Dorylus Molestus, which despite having a latin name that sounds like an allegation against your grandma, is in fact a living genus of east African army ants. So wise is Dorylus that when two colonies of the same species meet, they usually change marching direction to avoid conflicts. Dorylus are the largest known extant ant species, with the queen growing to a whopping 8 centimeters.

The discovery of a similarly-sized 50 million year old queen ant fossil raised eyebrows due to its enormous size  and because it was found in Wyoming. Like Dorylus, the now-named Titanomyrma could grow up to 8 centimetres in length, and so is comparable size-wise to that of a modern hummingbird:

How giant ants ended up in both North America and Europe is the big question, and to find the answer we have to look again at the changing climates of the Eocene epoch in the Paleogene period. The hyperthermals were geologically brief periods of global warming 55.5 - 52 million years ago caused by a massive carbon release from thawing permafrost. This caused many ice free land bridges between Europe and North America, which allowed different animal and plant species to cross.over.  Titanomyrma would have crossed over in this period, and  its discovery in Wyoming tells us that Wyoming in the early Eocene had a climate similar to that of East Africa today.