The ants crawl and make their way through almost all terrestrial masses on Earth today, except Antarctica and some remote or inhospitable islands. This was not always the case, but a new investigation suggests that ants had reached global ecosystems before what was thought.
“Our team has discovered a new species of fossil ants that represents the first indisputable geological record of ants,” says Anderson Lepeco of the Zoology Museum of the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Lepeco and his collaborators discovered the fossil of 113 million years in a unearthed collection of the Crato training in the Northeast of Brazil.
According to a article describing the specimen in the newspaper Current biologyThe new species (Vulcanidris Cratensis) He was a member of the extinct Haidomyrmecinae subfamily: “What makes this discovery particularly interesting is that it belongs to the extinct ‘hell’, known for its strange predatory adaptations,” says Lepeco.
“Despite being part of an old lineage, this species already showed highly specialized anatomical characteristics, which suggests unique hunting behaviors.”
These threatening insects lived during the Cretaceous period and had highly specialized jaws and scythe that they probably used to fix or empare prisoners. The oldest hell ants specimens before, dating from about 100 million years ago, were preserved in Amber in France and Burma.
Microcomputed tomography images, a 3D image technique that uses radiographs to see the interior of an object, showed that the new species was closely related to hell ants that were previously known only of samples preserved in the Burmese amber.
The finding indicates that hell ants may have been the oldest main group of ants to diversify and spread throughout the world and must have crossed the masses of Cretaceous land repeatedly.
“Although there have been ants from hell described in Amber, this was the first time we could visualize this in a rock fossil,” says Lepeco.
But, while the team hoped to find characteristics of ants from hell, Lepeco says they were surprised by the feeding apparatus of the new species.
Unlike modern ants, which have jaws that move from side to side (laterally), the jaws of the new species ran parallel to their head and moved in a forward movement (ventrally) to understand their prey.
“Finding such an anatomically specialized ant of 113 million years ago challenges our assumptions about the speed with which these insects developed complex adaptations,” says Lepeco.
“The intricate morphology suggests that even these first ants had already evolved significantly different sophisticated predatory strategies of their modern counterparts.”
#Fosilized #hell
