A remarkable discovery in the fossil collection of a Brazilian museum has unveiled the oldest ant species ever recorded by science. The insect, which lived approximately 113 million years ago during the age of dinosaurs, was recently identified by researchers at the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo (MZUSP).
The 113-million-year-old fossil of a hell ant preserves tiny details of the insect’s wings.” – Anderson Lepeco
The breakthrough came when scientist Anderson Lepeco was reviewing specimens from the renowned fossil collection at MZUSP, considered one of the largest in the world for fossilized insects. There, he came across an exceptionally well-preserved sample from the Crato Formation, a fossil site in northeastern Brazil famous for its extraordinary preservation.
The extinct species, now named Vulcanidris cratensis, belongs to the so-called “hell ants” (subfamily Haidomyrmecinae), known for their distinctive sickle-shaped mandibles, likely used to catch or impale prey. Unlike modern ants, this lineage has no living descendants.
“I was struck by the strange projection on the front of the insect’s head,” said Lepeco, the lead author of the study published in Current Biology. “Other hell ants have been described with unusual mandibles, but always preserved in amber—never in rock, as in this case.”
This makes the discovery especially rare, as insects preserved in limestone are extremely uncommon. Until now, the oldest known hell ants came from amber found in France and Myanmar, dating back about 99 million years. This new fossil pushes that record back by roughly 10 million years, indicating that ants were already widespread on Earth very early in their evolutionary history.
The research sheds new light on how ants evolved during the early Cretaceous period—a time of major ecological shifts. Anatomical traits observed in this ancient species reveal stages of evolution that preceded the rise of the highly social and dominant ants we see today.
Nowadays, ants are one of the most visible and abundant insect groups on the planet, found on every continent except Antarctica. But their evolutionary journey began during the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods, about 145 million years ago, when their ancestors branched off from the same lineage that led to wasps and bees.
According to Phil Barden, a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an expert in insect evolution, “This is a major discovery that extends the known fossil record of ants by millions of years.” For him, the finding answers a long-standing question—whether the absence of older ant fossils was due to their scarcity at the time, or simply because they hadn’t been preserved in places scientists had searched.
Either way, Brazil has once again made its mark on the paleontological map — and this tiny ancestral ant has a lot to tell us about our planet’s ancient past.