The Oldest Known Ant Specimen Held Its Prey With Weird Mandibles, Researchers Claim

When you think of predators, you likely imagine big animals with sharp claws or teeth, like tigers or sharks. Over 100 million years ago, however, a tiny yet freakishly fearsome predator impaled its prey with scythe-like jaws. While investigating a large collection of fossil insects at the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo, researchers in Brazil realized that a 113-million-year-old fossil represents a new ant species and might be the oldest ant specimen known to science. The fossilized ant, named Vulcanidris cratensis, is a member of the extinct ant subfamily Haidomyrmecinae. Appropriately dubbed “hell ants,” Haidomyrmecinae ants existed during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) and are known to paleontologists for their vicious and highly specialized jaws. “Our team has discovered a new fossil ant species representing the earliest undisputable geological record of ants,” Anderson Lepeco, a researcher from the Museum of Zoology at the Universit ... Read full article.