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According to new research, an almost overlooked fossil that was discovered in a Brazilian museum collection has revealed the oldest ant copy.
The prehistoric ant lived among the dinosaurs 113 million years ago – 118 millennia earlier found ants before – and had an unusual way to kill his prey. Anderson Lepeco, a researcher at the Zoological Museum of the University of São Paulo, said that in September 2024 he came across the “extraordinary” specimen when he examined a fossil collection in the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo.
The museum has one of the world’s largest collections of petrified insects and contains specimens from the Krats formation of the northeast of Brazil, a geological deposit that is known for its extraordinary fossil maintenance.
The extinct insect, which is kept in Kalkstein, is what is known as hell of an ant, a member of a subfamily called Haidomyrmecinae, who lived between 66 million and 45 million years during the Cretaceous period, and today, according to a study published on Thursday, published on Thursday in the magazine Current Biology. The fossil species called Vulcanidris Cratensis had skythe -like jaws, with which they probably put prey or gushed.
“I was only shocked to see that the strange projection in front of this (insect) head,” said Lepeco, the main author of the study. “Other hell ants were described with strange mandibles, but always as amber -colored specimens.”
It is rare that insects are preserved in rocks. Other hell ants from the chalk period were discharged from France and Myanmar in Bernstein, but they come from around 99 million years. According to the authors of the study, the study lived that a hell of what is now in Brazil’s now lived that ants were already widespread at an early stage.
The discovery illuminates how ants developed during the early Cretaceous period, a time of significant change. It also offers an insight into unusual features in ANT types of this time that did not survive the mass extinction that the dinosaurs ended, the researchers said.
A CT scan was used to visualize what the ant would have looked. – ODAIR M. Meira
Anatomical characteristics lost at the time
Today ants are one of the most striking and abundant groups of insects on the planet, which were found on all continents with the exception of the Antarctic, the study said.
However, ants were not always dominant. They developed during the late Jura and early circular times about 145 million years ago when ants from the same group that would produce wasps and bees were absent.
Only after an asteroid strike that had sentenced the dinosaurs and other species to extinction of the fossil stock 66 million years ago 66 million years ago.
The fossil is a “pretty big thing,” said Phil Barden, Associate Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who examines the evolutionary history of insects.
“This new find is now the oldest known ant, which extends the well -known fossil stock for ants by about ten million years,” said Barden, who was not involved in the study by e -mail.
“Although fossil ants have been described since the 19th century … Until now it was not clear whether the lack of ants over 100 million years was not nearby or only that they are not preserved in deposits in which people checked,” he added.
The newly identified species also had some wasp-like properties that indicate the common descent between the two creatures. For example, the wings of the ant had far more veins than that of living ants, said Lepeco.
The microcomputed tomography imaging-a 3D-image technology, the X-rays in the ant use that the error was closely related to hell ants, which were previously only known from Burmese amber fossils.
What was most striking about the ant were her unusual anatomical features. Modern ants have jaws that start on the side – side to the side. However, this ant owned scythe-like jaws, which ran into her head in parallel and projected to the front from the vicinity of the eyes, as the researchers found in the study.
“It could have worked as a kind of forklift and move upwards,” as the ant hunted on other extinct insects, said Lepeco by e -mail.
“The complicated morphology suggests that even these earliest ants had already developed demanding predatory strategies that differ significantly from their modern objects,” added Lepeco.
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