Formicarius is a genus of passerine birds in the family Formicariidae.

The genus Formicarius was introduced by the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert in 1783 in his catalogue of the ten volumes of hand-coloured plates that had been engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet.

The plates were produced to accompany Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

[2] The type species was subsequently designated as the rufous-capped antthrush (Formicarius colma) by the English zoologist George Robert Gray in 1840.

It is based on a large molecular phylogenetic study of the suboscines by Michael Harvey and collaborators that was published in 2020.