Termitaradus dominicanus

Termitaradus dominicanus is an extinct species of termite bug in the family Termitaphididae known from a Miocene fossil found on Hispaniola. T. dominicanus is the third species in the genus Termitaradus to have been described from fossils found in Dominican amber after Termitaradus avitinquilinus and Termitaradus mitnicki.

Termitaradus dominicanus is known from a single fossil insect which is an inclusion in a transparent chunk of Dominican amber 13 by 10 by 5 millimetres (0.51 by 0.39 by 0.20 in) in size. The amber specimen, HE-4-52, is currently housed in the fossil collection of the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California. The holotype fossil is composed of a complete adult individual that was collected from an unidentified amber mine between Puerto Plata and Santiago de los Caballeros. Dominican amber is recovered from fossil-bearing rocks in the Cordillera Septentrional mountains of the northern Dominican Republic. The amber dates from at least the Burdigalian stage of the Miocene, based on studying the associated fossil foraminifera, and may be as old as the Middle Eocene, based on the associated fossil coccoliths. Due to the host rock being secondary deposits for the amber, the age range is only the youngest that it might be. The holotype was first studied by paleoentomologists George Poinar, Jr. of Oregon State University and Ernst Heiss of Innsbruck, Austria. Poinar's 2011 type description of the species was published in the paleontology journal Palaeodiversity. The specific epithet dominicanus was coined as a reference to the country of the type locality, the Dominican Republic.