'Hell Ant' Is Oldest Ever Found—by Millions of Years

An overlooked fossil in storage in Brazil was hiding the 113-million-year-old remains of a "hell ant," now the oldest ant specimen known to science. The winged ant dubbed Vulcanidris cratensis, described Thursday in Current Biology, is one of numerous extinct "hell ant" species, so named for their demonic-looking jaws. But this one shows ants have been crawling around Earth for far longer than anyone realized—about 14 million years longer. It also "offers the first undisputed evidence of ants in South America during the Cretaceous, extending the known ant record on the continent by over 60 million years," an expert tells the Washington Post.

The world's oldest known ants, dating back 99 million years, come from amber deposits in France and Myanmar. Anderson Lepeco, a researcher at Brazil's University of São Paulo, thought there was a chance that older ants might turn up in fossils stored at the university's Museum of Zoology. But when he spotted the winged ant preserved in limestone taken from Brazil's Crato Konservat-Lagerstätte geological formation and compared it to the Myanmar fossils, he started "jumping through the lab," he tells the Post. "I was just shocked." Micro-computed tomography allowed researchers to see parts of the ant trapped inside the rock, including impressive scythe-like jaws. "Other hell ants have been described with odd mandibles, but always as amber specimens," Lepeco tells CNN.

Hell ants had jaws that moved upward as opposed to side to side and "could snap shut vertically," per Live Science. They likely used them to pin or impale prey. But "until now, it was not clear if the absence of ants older than 100 million years was because they were not around or just that they were not preserved in deposits where people were looking," an expert tells CNN. This specimen—with some wasp-like characteristics, hinting at the shared ancestor to ants and wasps—adds to our understanding of ant evolution, offering a look at unusual features that didn't survive the mass extinction that took out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. Only then did ants become the insect we know today. (More discoveries stories.)