Ammon News - An almost overlooked fossil discovered in a Brazilian museum collection has revealed the oldest ant specimen known to science, according to new research.

The prehistoric ant lived among dinosaurs 113 million years ago — several millennia before previously found ants — and had an unusual way to kill its prey. Anderson Lepeco, a researcher at the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo, said he came across the “extraordinary” specimen in September 2024 while examining a fossil collection housed at the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo.

The museum has one of the world’s largest collections of fossilized insects and contains specimens from northeastern Brazil’s Crato Formation, a geological deposit renowned for its exceptional fossil preservation.

Preserved in limestone, the newly described extinct insect is what’s known as a hell ant, a member of a subfamily called Haidomyrmecinae that lived during the Cretaceous period between 66 million and 45 million years ago and is not related to any ant alive today, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. The fossil species, which has been named Vulcanidris cratensis, had scythe-like jaws that it likely used to pin or impale prey.

“I was just shocked to see that weird projection in front of this (insect’s) head,” Lepeco, the study’s lead author, said. “Other hell ants have been described with odd mandibles, but always as amber specimens.”

It’s rare to find insects preserved in rock. Other hell ants from the Cretaceous have been found entombed in amber from France and Myanmar but they date back to around 99 million years ago. That a hell ant lived before that in what’s now Brazil means ants were already widely distributed across the planet at an early point in their evolution, the study authors noted.

The discovery sheds light on how ants evolved during the early Cretaceous, a time of significant change. It also offers some insight into unusual features in ant species of this period that didn’t survive the mass extinction that ended the dinosaur era, the researchers said. CNN