Get back to me when they find some the size of the ones in the movie "Them".
P.S. The bonus question: Why WON'T they?
Posted by: "Lin Kerns" linkerns@gmail.com lin.kerns Date: Sat Mar
3, 2012 4:50 pm ((PST))
(If only we had amber to keep it in!--Lin) 'Monstrously big ant'
fossil found in
Wyoming Giant ants the size of hummingbirds traversed the Arctic during
warm periods, a new study finds.
By LiveScienceThu, May 05 2012
<http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/monstrously-big-ant-fossil-found-in-wyoming?src=st#comments>
[image: 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 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.
Likewise, ancient giant ant fossils have been found in Europe in areas
that were tropical during the early part of the Eocene, an epoch that
lasted from 56 million to 34 million years ago, a time when the
continents were closer together and the sea level was low: "You could
have walked from Vancouver to London across dry land," Archibald said.
But to cross the continents, you still had to traverse the Arctic. Back
then, the Arctic was much warmer than it is today, a temperate zone
rather than a winter wonderland.
*An open Arctic for ants*
"Temperate" would have been too chilly for the giant ants, however. The
key to the ants' march, Archibald and his colleagues found, were
relatively brief periods in which temperature shot up enough to make the
Arctic passable. These periods, which lasted a few hundred thousand
years each, may have been driven by the release of carbon dioxide from
sediment.
The warm periods would have brought the average temperature in the
coldest Arctic months up to 46 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius), a
survivable temperature for the tropical ants.
The researchers aren't sure whether the ants started in Europe and
spread to North America or the other way around. University of Bonn
paleoentomologist Torsten Wappler, who was not involved in the study, is
working to classify the various species of ancient giant ants and
describe how they lived. Some fossils preserve bits of organs, including
stingers, genitalia and stomachs, Wappler told LiveScience.
"Now we can compare this North American species with the European ones,"
Wappler said. "That was not possible before." The comparison may shed
light on the bugs' origin.
*Photo: Bruce Archibald*
*This article was reprinted with permission from
LiveScience<http://www.livescience.com/>
.*
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/monstrously-big-ant-fossil-found-in-wyoming?src=st
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