A fossil of 110 million years of hell anti -idris catensis
Anderson Lepeco
With more than 110 million years, an excavated fossil in Brazil is the oldest unquestionable ant discovered. It finds evidence that the first ants evolved in the Gondwana Supercontinent in the southern hemisphere before extending the rest of the world.
“We have evidence that they were in South America, they were in Gondwana, their early evolution lasted,” says Anderson Lepeco at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Lepeco met the fossil in a large collection delivered to the University Zoological Museum. All specimens come from Crato formation in the Northeast of Brazil, which formed the lower Cretaceous period.
Immediately suspended this fossil was an extinct group of insects called Hell Ants. “That shape of the head was similar to a species that we found in the Burmese amber,” he says. “This gives me the track.”
Hell ants are privileged because they represent a “stem lineage” of transition, says Lepeco-who are more closely related to the common ancestor of all WASP ants than with the living structures of the species.
When the fossil was scanned in 3D, this revealed other characteristics that identified it as an infernal ant. For example, he had jaws similar to the lifting wheelbarrow that could have allowed him to biased other insects. In fact, it is this horrible characteristic that generates the group of ants.
The researchers appointed the kind of ants in New Hell Vulcanidris Cratensisin recognition of the Brazilian entomologist Maria Apartida Vulcano. Based on the rock strata in which it was found, the researchers suspect that the fossil is about 113 million years old, 13 million years older than the previous Ant Fossil.
“Before our new fossil, the first ants known as fossils were from France and Myanmar,” says Lepeco. Finding such ancient hell ants in South America aligns with the genomic evidence that suggests that ants evolved for the first time in the southern hemisphere before dispersing through much of the world and establishing the dominant ecological corn today.
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