Pest From The Past

The illustration above shows a 92 million-year-old worker ant that was discovered, along with six others, in central New Jersey by scientists from New York’s American Museum of Natural History. The discovery is reported in today’s issue of the esteemed science journal Nature. The fossilized ants, encased in amber, are not the oldest ever found, but they offer striking new insights. One of the finds is surprisingly advanced for the era in which it lived, suggesting ants may have started evolving earlier than previously thought.