A rare fossil in Dominican amber unveils a miniature, ancient “dirt ant” once native to the Caribbean. Ants are a common sight wherever soil is found, but one group is so expertly camouflaged that ...

The fossil extinct giant ant Titanomyrma from Wyoming that was discovered over a decade ago by SFU paleontologist Bruce Archibald and collaborators at the Denver Museum. The fossil queen ant is next ...

A newly discovered 16-million-year-old fossil of an elusive “dirt ant” preserved in Dominican amber has stunned scientists ...

According to new research, relying on ants as a sole food source has evolved at least 12 times in mammals since the reign of ...

Hidden for over 100 million years in Brazil’s limestone-rich Crato Formation, researchers recently uncovered the oldest known specimen of a now-extinct predator known as the “hell ant.” With ...

A rare 16 million-year-old ant preserved in amber is helping scientists uncover new secrets about one of nature's most elusive insects. The newly discovered species of "dirt ant" -- named for its ...

Its jaws also closed vertically like those of humans, rather than horizontally like modern ants. A hell ant fossil described 113 million years after its extinction. Image courtesy of Anderson Lepeco.

The UN estimates as many as 200 species of plants and animals become extinct. "We're in an extinction crisis. It's the sixth mass extinction that many scientists say we're in," Wray says.

It wasn't always this way; just after the dinosaurs went extinct, ants represented less than 1 percent of the insect population, exploding around 23 million years ago at the beginning of the Miocene.