A worker of the hell ant Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri grasping a nymph of Caputoraptor elegans preserved in amber from Myanmar. Image credit: New Jersey Institute of Technology / Chinese Academy of Sciences / University of Rennes.
SciNews has a story about an interesting ant found in amber. Found in Burma, the "hell ant" (Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri) lived during the Cretaceious Period about 78 million years ago. The "hell ants" due to their horn-like appendages on their head. Details can be found in a paper in the journal Current Biology.
“Fossilized behavior is exceedingly rare, predation especially so,” said lead author Dr. Phillip Barden, a researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History.
“As paleontologists, we speculate about the function of ancient adaptations using available evidence, but to see an extinct predator caught in the act of capturing its prey is invaluable.”
“This fossilized predation confirms our hypothesis for how hell ant mouthparts worked. The only way for prey to be captured in such an arrangement is for the ant mouthparts to move up and downward in a direction unlike that of all living ants and nearly all insects.”
The hell ant lineage, along with their striking predatory traits, are suspected to have vanished along with many other early ant groups during periods of ecological change around the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago.
“Since the first hell ant was unearthed about a hundred years ago, it’s been a mystery as to why these extinct animals are so distinct from the ants we have today,” Dr. Barden said.
