"Monstrously Big" Ant Fossil Found in Wyoming, USA

[Eldritch]

A two-inch-long ant that once roamed Wyoming rivals today's hummingbirds in size.

Almost 50 million years ago, ants the size of hummingbirds roamed what is now Wyoming, a new fossil discovery reveals. These giant bugs may have crossed an Arctic land bridge between Europe and North America during a particularly warm period in Earth's history.

At about 2 inches (5 cm) long, the specimen is a "monstrously big ant," said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.

The fossil ant is from a well-known fossil site in Wyoming called the Green River Formation, but it had been sitting in a drawer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Archibald said. When a curator showed him the fossil, Archibald said, he knew he was looking at something exciting.

"I immediately recognized it and said, 'Oh my god, this is a giant ant and it looks like it's related to giant ants that are known from about this time in Germany.'"

One living ant species, Dorylus wilverthi, has queens that reach the size of this ancient ant, though Titanomyrma was big all over while D. wilverthi gets its size from an abnormally swollen abdomen, Archibald said.

Archibald dubbed the new ant Titanomyrma lubei -- "titan" for its size, "myrma" for the Greek, "myrmex," or ant, and "lubei" for the fossil collector who discovered the specimen, Louis Lube. The burning question, however, was how giant ants ended up on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Monster ant

Ants are tough bugs -- some can even create rafts out of their own bodies to survive floods. But a look at modern large ants showed Archibald and his colleagues that T. lubei very likely needed a warm climate to live, similar to modern-day giant ants. For instance, D. wilverthi lives in equatorial Africa. Other ants bigger than about an inch (3 cm) long are spread across tropical areas of South America, Southeast Asia and Australia.

Link.

Article by Archibald et. al. here.

[Rosenrot]

Damn! |o|
Ants, ok. But can you imagine the cockroaches? More scary then the crazy stuff we have in Amazonia.

[Sertorius]

Isn't it true that things were bigger millions of years ago cause there was more oxygen in the atmosphere? I've heard that's why the dinosaurs got so damn huge.

[Eldritch]

Isn't it true that things were bigger millions of years ago cause there was more oxygen in the atmosphere? I've heard that's why the dinosaurs got so damn huge.

Well, it apparently is true that the oxygen content in the atmosphere has been higher in some previous eras. But there's also an old theory that the evolution of plants that produced more oxygen is what killed off the dinosaurs.

[Lahtari]

Isn't it true that things were bigger millions of years ago cause there was more oxygen in the atmosphere? I've heard that's why the dinosaurs got so damn huge.

Wasn't it just about insects, instead of *krhm*, things?

[Boudica]

Ah well i'm just glad their not here today, that freaks me out lol