Myrmeciidae, family Myrmicidae. Smith, who had originally established the Myrmicidae as a family in 1851, reclassified them as a subfamily in 1858. He again treated them as a family in 1871. Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel initially treated the Poneridae as a subfamily and classified Myrmecia as one of its constituent genera but later placed it in the Ponerinae. William H. Ashemad placed the genus in the subfamily Myrmeciinae in 1905, but it was later placed back in the Ponerinae in 1910 by American entomologist William Morton Wheeler. In 1954, Myrmecia was placed into the Myrmeciinae; this was the last time the genus was placed into a different ant subfamily. In 1911, Emery classified the subgenera Myrmecia, Pristomyrmecia, and Promyrmecia, based on the shape of their mandibles. Wheeler established the subgenus Halmamyrmecia, and the ants placed in it were characterized by their jumping behavior. The taxon Wheeler described was not referred to in his later publications, and the genera Halmamyrmecia and Pristomyrmecia were synonymised by John Clark. At the same time, Clark reclassified the subgenus Promyrmecia as a full genus. He revised the whole subfamily Myrmeciinae in 1951, recognizing 118 species and subspecies in Myrmecia and Promyrmecia; five species groups were assigned to Myrmecia and eight species groups to Promyrmecia. This revision was rejected by entomologist William Brown due to the lack of morphological evidence that would make the two genera distinct from each other. Due to this, Brown classified Promyrmecia as a synonym of Myrmecia in 1953. Clark's revision was the last major taxonomic study on the genus before 1991, and only a single species was described in the intervening years. In 2015, four new Myrmecia ants were described by Robert Taylor, all exclusive to Australia. Currently, 94 species are described in the genus, but as many as 130 species may exist. Under the present classification, Myrmecia is the only extant genus in the tribe Myrmeciini, subfamily Myrmeciinae. It is a member of the family Formicidae in the order Hymenoptera. The type species for the genus is M. gulosa, discovered by Joseph Banks in 1770 during his expedition with James Cook on HMS Endeavour. M. gulosa is among the earliest Australian insects to be described, and the specimen Banks collected is housed in the Joseph Banks Collection in the Natural History Museum, London. M. gulosa was described by Fabricius in 1775 under the name Formica gulosa and later designated as