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A freshly discovered " hell ant " fossil may be the oldest pismire ever found , scientists say .
This ossified insect was unearth in what is now northeasterly Brazil and lived around 113 million year ago , during the Cretaceous period ( 145 million to 66 million years ago ) , harmonise to a raw study published April 24 in the journalCurrent Biology .
A photograph of the fossilized “hell ant."
" Our team has discovered a unexampled fossil ant specie representing the earliest indisputable geologic record of emmet , " work co - authorAnderson Lepeco , a researcher at the Zoological Museum of the University of São Paulo in Brazil , said in a statement . " What create this uncovering specially interesting is that it belong to the extinct ' hell ant , ' known for their bizarre predatory adaptation . "
The newly see ancient ant species , which research worker have namedVulcanidris cratensis , had scythe - similar , upward - facing jaws , which it may have used to clutch and impale its quarry . " Despite being part of an ancient lineage , this species already display highly specialized anatomic feature , suggesting singular hunting behaviors , " Lepeco say .
There are more than12,000species of ants on Earth today , and they can be see in diverse environments , from rainforest to comeuppance . They go to the family Formicidae , which is part of the order Hymenoptera ( which also includes bees and wasp ) . Ants are thought to have evolved from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant - like ascendent around140 million years ago .
An illustration of what this ancient ant species might have looked like.
Haidomyrmecinae , also call " Scheol pismire , " were an extinct subfamily of ancient ant that lived during this stop . A handful of previous hell ant species have been discovered in amber fossils in Myanmar , France and Canada , date back around 100 million year , which until now were the earliest known ant fossils .
These hell ants had a freakish head word and jaw complex body part unlike anything seen in modern ants , with upward - curved jaw or else of inward- or downwardly - curved jaws like modernistic ants , which could snatch shut vertically . Many species also had horn - like projection above their rima oris , which are thought to have clamped against the jaws to trammel prey . One antecedently discovered 99 million - year - old fossil even captureda hell pismire in the act of vote out fair game , freeze in amber mid - rap .
The newfound coinage of hell ant was preserved in limestone in the Crato Konservat - Lagerstätte geological formation in Brazil , which was oncelocated in the northof the ancient supercontinent Gondwana . The fossil was then rediscovered by researchers among a collection house at the Zoological Museum of the University of São Paulo .
" When I see this sinful specimen , we immediately recognized its significance , not only as a new species but as potentially the classical evidence of ants in the Crato Formation , " Lepeco said . " This determination highlights the importance of thorough examination of survive collections — private or in museums — and add a spot to Brazilian palaeontology and the underexplored dodo dirt ball brute of the country . "
At 113 million years old , this ant is the earliest ant specimen ever let out , and is also the first the pits ant to be discovered preserved in rock-and-roll , Lepeco noted .
Using micro - computed imaging imagination , a technique that uses Adam - ray to see inside an physical object , the research worker confirm that the ant species was a hell ant , identifying the characteristic upward - face jaws .
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The fact that this emmet is the early ant ever found and already possessed the same iconic scythe - like jaws as other nether region ants , suggests that these traits evolve early after emmet first appeared .
The researcher also discovered that this newfound species of ant was likely closely concern to other hell ants found keep in amber in Myanmar , meaning that ants were already widely distributed across the globe sooner than scientists had assumed .
" Finding such an anatomically specialized ant from 113 million years ago challenge our Assumption about how quickly these insects develop complex adaptation , " Lepeco said . " The intricate sound structure suggest that even these early pismire had already evolved sophisticated predatory strategies significantly unlike from their modern counterparts . "
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