Oldest ant fossil ever discovered reveals how ants took over the world

At greater than 110 million years outdated, a fossil excavated in Brazil is the oldest undisputed ant fossil ever found. The discovering provides to proof that the primary ants developed on the supercontinent of Gondwana within the southern hemisphere earlier than spreading throughout the remainder of the world.

“We’ve proof they had been in South America, they had been in Gondwana, throughout their early evolution,” says Anderson Lepeco on the College of São Paulo in Brazil.

Lepeco got here throughout the fossil in a big assortment delivered to the college’s zoological museum. The specimens all got here from the Crato Formation in north-east Brazil, which fashioned in the course of the Decrease Cretaceous Interval.

He instantly suspected this fossil was from an extinct group of bugs referred to as hell ants. “That head form was just like one species we present in Burmese amber,” he says. “This gave me the trace.”

Hell ants are significantly attention-grabbing as a result of they signify a transitional “stem lineage”, says Lepeco – they’re extra carefully associated to the wasp-like frequent ancestor of all ants than to the species alive as we speak, though they did have ant-like social constructions.

When the fossil was 3D scanned, this revealed different traits that recognized it as a hell ant. As an illustration, it had forklift-like mandibles that will have enabled it to skewer different bugs. Actually, it’s this ugly characteristic that gave the hell ant group its identify.

The researchers named the brand new hell ant species Vulcanidris cratensis, in recognition of the Brazilian entomologist Maria Aparecida Vulcano. Primarily based on the rock strata through which it was discovered, the researchers suspect the fossil is about 113 million years outdated, 13 million years older than the earlier oldest recognized ant fossil.

“Earlier than our new fossil, the earliest ants referred to as fossils had been from France and Myanmar,” says Lepeco. Discovering such an historic hell ant in South America aligns with genomic proof suggesting ants first developed within the southern hemisphere earlier than dispersing all through a lot of the remainder of the world and establishing the dominant ecological function they keep as we speak.