Amber Fossil Reavels ‘Hell Ant’ Was Unlike Anything Alive Today

The 99-million-yr-old ant had scythe-like jaws that swung upward to pin prey against a horn-like head appendage.

Some 99 million years back, an ant, unlike any alive today, was in the middle of a savage scythe-jawed strike when dripping plant resin froze the insect and its prey in a final predatory tableau.

New study research based on this amber-tinted window into the Cretaceous confirms that so-called “hell ants” killed with the assistance of recurved mandibles which swung upward, pinning or also impaling the victim against a horn-like protrusion sticking out of its forehead, reports Lucy Hicks for Science.

“Hell ants have 2 features found in no living species: very specialized scythe-like mandibles and a wide variety of horns that are present on what is essentially the forehead,” Phillip Barden, a paleontologist at the New Jersey Institute of Innovation and also lead writer of the paper, informs Katie Hunt of CNN.

Paleontologists have long surmised that unique mouthparts of the sixteen known kinds of hell ant hinged close vertically rather than horizontally, as is the case in all living ant kinds. Nevertheless, the newly explained specimen is the first hard proof that this is indeed how these early ants sharp jaws functioned, the scientists report this week in the journal Current Biology.

“The only form for prey to be caught in such an arrangement is for the ant mouthparts to shift up and downward in a position unlike that of all living ants and nearly all insects,” Barden states in a statement.

The hunk of amber containing this old drama was 1st unearthed in 2017 in Myanmar. The region has produced a trove of mind-blowing fossils. However, the armed conflict has tied the amber trade to horrifying human rights violations, leading many to stop dealing with fossils from the area, as Joshua Sokol reported for Science in 2019.

The authors of the current research study note that the fossil came from in Myanmar’s Kachin State however was “deposited in the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences before the 2017 military control of some mine areas … All writers declare that the fossil reported in this research was not involved in armed conflict also ethnic strife in Myanmar.”

The specific hell ant locked inside this fossilized amber is Ceratomyrmex Ellenbergeri and its prey, that has its head crushed between the ant’s jaws, is a cockroach-relative known as Caputoraptor elegans.

“Once the prey was gripped in this form, the ant most probably moved on to an immobilizing sting– we know that the stings of hell ants were well created,” Barden informs Hannah Osborne of Newsweek.

Speaking with Mindy Weisberger of Live Science, Barden hypothesizes the gruesome fate which might have got awaited the cockroach nymph after being paralyzed by the ant’s sting: “They have these extremely specialized mouthparts that are so exaggerated they can not feed themselves. Instead, they feed the prey to their own larvae– and the larvae have unspecialized mouthparts so that they can chew normally.”

So, after the pale larvae have had their fill, Barden recommends that the adult hell ants could make tiny incisions in the larvae’s soft bodies and drink the next generation’s blood (called hemolymph in insects). “Basically, they utilize their own siblings and offspring as a social digestive system,” Barden tells Live Science. “We do not have direct proof that’s the case here, but that could be something that is happening.”

For those alarmed by Barden’s fancy, the inspiration for this grisly scene is a living kind known as the Dracula ant.

Hell ants are among the earliest called ants, but what remains a mystery is why they, along with their unique jaws, died roughly 65 million years ago after some 20 million years of roaming the earth, while the relatives of modern ants persisted and flourished.

“Over 99 percent of all kinds that have ever lived have gone extinct,” Barden states in the statement. “As our earth undergoes its sixth mass extinction occasion, it is important that we work to understand extinct diversity and also what may enable certain lineages to persist while others quit. I believe fossil insects are a reminder that even something as ubiquitous and familiar as ants have undergone extinction.”

Read the original article on Smith Sonian Magazine.