Fossil find extends ants’ ancient lineage

When David A. Grimaldi, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, gazed into a 92-million-year-old piece of amber that had been donated to the museum about 6 months before, he saw something rather unexpected. “But I knew exactly what it was,” he adds.

This anatomically primitive, 92-million-year-old ant encased in amber pushes back the origin of its subfamily more than 40 million years.