Oldest-known Ant Preserved in 113 Million-year-old Brazilian Fossil

A 113-million-year-old fossilized ant preserved in limestone unearthed in northeastern Brazil, the world's oldest-known ant specimen is seen in this photograph released on April 24, 2025. Anderson Lepeco/Current Biology/Handout via REUTERS
A 113-million-year-old fossilized ant preserved in limestone unearthed in northeastern Brazil, the world's oldest-known ant specimen is seen in this photograph released on April 24, 2025. Anderson Lepeco/Current Biology/Handout via REUTERS
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Oldest-known Ant Preserved in 113 Million-year-old Brazilian Fossil

A 113-million-year-old fossilized ant preserved in limestone unearthed in northeastern Brazil, the world's oldest-known ant specimen is seen in this photograph released on April 24, 2025. Anderson Lepeco/Current Biology/Handout via REUTERS
A 113-million-year-old fossilized ant preserved in limestone unearthed in northeastern Brazil, the world's oldest-known ant specimen is seen in this photograph released on April 24, 2025. Anderson Lepeco/Current Biology/Handout via REUTERS

Scientists have identified the fossilized remains of the oldest-known ant - a winged insect with fearsome scythe-like jaws that lived about 113 million years ago during the age of dinosaurs and was preserved in limestone unearthed in northeastern Brazil.
The species, called Vulcanidris cratensis, is part of a lineage called hell ants - named for their demonic-looking jaws - that prospered in a wide geographical range during the Cretaceous Period but have no descendants alive today, Reuters reported. A previously discovered Cretaceous hell ant was named Haidomyrmex in honor of Hades, the ancient Greek god of the underworld.
A medium-sized ant about a half-inch (1.35 cm) long, Vulcanidris possessed highly specialized jaws that would have enabled it to pin down or impale prey. Like some ants alive today, it had wings and appears to have been a capable flier. It also had a well-developed stinger like a wasp.
"It would probably be confused with a wasp by an untrained eye," said entomologist Anderson Lepeco of the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Current Biology.
"They probably used their mandibles (mouthparts) to handle their prey in a specific way," Lepeco said.
Its mandibles moved up and down and not side to side, as they do in today's ants.
"Currently, many odd mandible shapes can be found in ants, but they usually articulate horizontally," Lepeco said.
This ant is roughly 13 million years older than the previous oldest-known ants, specimens found in France and Myanmar that were preserved in amber, which is fossilized tree sap.
The Vulcanidris anatomy is remarkably well preserved in the limestone, which was excavated decades ago in the Crato geological formation in the Brazilian state of Ceará, probably in the 1980s or 1990s, according to Lepeco. It was held in a private collection before being donated to the São Paulo museum about five years ago.
"I was looking for wasps among the fossils of the collection and was shocked when I recognized this one as a close relative of a hell ant previously described from Burmese amber," Lepeco said, referring to the fossil from Myanmar.
The specialized nature of the Vulcanidris anatomy and the fact that two hell ants lived so far from each other during this part of the Cretaceous suggest that ants as a group emerged many millions of years before this newly identified species existed.
"According to molecular estimates, ants originated between 168 million and 120 million years ago. This new finding supports an earlier age within these limits," Lepeco said.
Ants are believed to have evolved from a form of wasp. Their closest living relatives are wasps and bees.
Vulcanidris inhabited an ecosystem teeming with life. Fossils from the region show that Vulcanidris lived alongside other insects, spiders, millipedes, centipedes, various crustaceans, turtles, crocodilians, flying reptiles called pterosaurs, birds and dinosaurs including the feathered meat-eater Ubirajara. The ant's predators may have included frogs, birds, spiders and larger insects.
Ants have colonized almost everywhere on Earth, and research published in 2022 estimated that their total population is 20 quadrillion globally. That dwarfs the human population of about 8 billion.
"They are one of the most abundant groups in most environments on Earth," Lepeco said.
"They play many roles where they occur, such as predation and herbivory, controlling populations of other organisms. They also have intrinsic relationships with specific plants and insects, protecting them from other animals. Subterranean and litter ants help in soil health, and they may also act as decomposers, feeding on dead organisms," Lepeco said.



Killer Whales Found Sharing Food with Humans

FILE - Whales swim past as a fisherman stands in his boat at Boat Harbour north of Sydney, Australia, on June 12, 2023. (AP Photo/Mark Baker,File)
FILE - Whales swim past as a fisherman stands in his boat at Boat Harbour north of Sydney, Australia, on June 12, 2023. (AP Photo/Mark Baker,File)
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Killer Whales Found Sharing Food with Humans

FILE - Whales swim past as a fisherman stands in his boat at Boat Harbour north of Sydney, Australia, on June 12, 2023. (AP Photo/Mark Baker,File)
FILE - Whales swim past as a fisherman stands in his boat at Boat Harbour north of Sydney, Australia, on June 12, 2023. (AP Photo/Mark Baker,File)

Killer whales sometimes offer to share their prey with people, a new study finds, hinting that some intelligent orcas may be attempting to develop relationships with humans.

Pet animals such as cats sometimes leave prey at their owner’s feet or doorstep, often as a display of affection or as a sense of sharing food with “family.”

But such behavior hadn’t been documented among animals in the wild. Until now, that is.

The new study documenting orcas offering food to humans in the wild challenges assumptions about animal social behavior, revealing a poorly understood interplay between marine mammals and humans that’s playful and social.

In the new study, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, and reported by The Independent newspaper, researchers from Canada, New Zealand, and Mexico document 34 interactions over two decades involving orcas attempting to offer food to humans. These incidents took place across the world, in the oceans off California, New Zealand, Norway, and Patagonia.

“Orcas often share food with each other. It’s a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other,” study lead author Jared Towers said. “That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well.”

The researchers analyzed each of the 34 instances of food sharing and found that people were in the water when the orcas approached them on 11 occasions. In 21 instances the humans were on boats and in two instances they were on the shore.

In each of these cases, the killer whales approached the people on their own and dropped their prey in front of them. “This behavior may represent some of the first accounts of a wild predator intentionally using prey, and other items, to directly explore human behavior,” the researchers wrote.

“These features all suggest that killer whales possess the capacity and motivation to share for multiple reasons which could include short– or long-term tangible, intellectual, or emotional benefits, none of which are mutually exclusive.”

The researchers also found that the orcas waited around to see what would happen after they made the offering to humans in all but one instance.

The marine mammals also tried to be persuasive, offering the food more than once in seven cases after the people initially refused it.

Since orcas are intelligent and social animals, the researchers suspect food sharing may be a way to build relationships with kin and unrelated individuals.

As the killer whales often hunt large prey, they have food to spare.

“Offering items to humans could simultaneously include opportunities for killer whales to practice learned cultural behavior, explore or play and, in so doing, learn about, manipulate or develop relationships with us,” the study said.

The study also showed that, “Given the advanced cognitive abilities and social, cooperative nature of this species, we assume that any or all these explanations for, and outcomes of such behavior are possible.”