CSIRO PUBLISHING Invertebrate Systematics, 2017, 31, 765–780 http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/IS16067 Where Fossils Dare and Males Matter: combined morphological and molecular analysis untangles the evolutionary history of the spider ant genus Leptomyrmex Mayr (Hymenoptera : Dolichoderinae) Phillip Barden A,B,E, Brendon Boudinot C and Andrea Lucky D ADepartment of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ 07102, USA. BRichard Gilder Graduate School, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024, USA. CDepartment of Entomology and Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. DEntomology and Nematology Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. ECorresponding author. Present address: Department of Biological Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA. Email:
[email protected] Abstract. The distinctive ant genus Leptomyrmex Mayr, 1862 had been thought to be endemic to Australasia for over 150 years, but enigmatic Neotropical fossils have challenged this view for decades. The present study responds to a recent and surprising discovery of extant Leptomyrmex species in Brazil with a thorough evaluation of the Dominican Republic fossil material, which dates to the Miocene. In the first case study of direct fossil inclusion within Formicidae Latreille, 1809, we incorporated both living and the extinct Leptomyrmex species. Through simultaneous analysis of molecular and morphological characters in both Bayesian and parsimony frameworks, we recovered the fossil taxon as sister-group to extant Leptomyrmex in Brazil while considering the influence of taxonomic and character sampling on inferred hypotheses relating to tree topology, biogeography and morphological evolution. We also identified potential loss of signal in the binning of morphological characters and tested the impact of parameterisation on divergence date estimation.