The Europeans thought they were blessed by the gods not to suffer the voracious raids of the terrible army ants. In reality, providence eliminated them from the continent. For the first time, scientists have found a beautifully preserved fossil in amber. Mined from the Baltic around 1930, it had been lying around in a dark drawer in Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Geology ever since. The 3 millimeter insect, regarding thirty-five million years old, belongs to a hitherto unknown lineage and obviously extinguished. Devoid of eyes, this ant is close to another line of blind ants present in Africa and South Asia, named Dorylus. baptized He was always dissimulatingit has sharp mandibles and a “enlarged antibiotic gland” witness, according to the researchers, of an exclusively subterranean way of life. So far, the only exhumed army ant fossil, estimated to be 16 million years old, came from the Caribbean.
