113-Million-Year-Old ‘Hell Ant’ Fossil Is the Oldest Ant Ever Discovered

When entomologist Anderson Lepeco spotted a strange fossil in a museum drawer, he nearly screamed in the lab. Trapped in a slab of 113-million-year-old limestone was an ancient ant with a bizarre, scythe-like jaw—and it turned out to be the oldest ant ever discovered.

“I was just shocked to see that weird projection in front of this (insect’s) head,” said Lepeco, lead author of the new study published in Current Biology. “Other hell ants have been described with odd mandibles, but always as amber specimens.”

This one wasn’t in amber. It was preserved in rock, making it an exceptionally rare find—and it came from Brazil’s Crato Formation, a site known for fossilized insects that usually defy logic and decay. Named Vulcanidris cratensis, this extinct species belonged to the now-vanished subfamily Haidomyrmecinae, better known as hell ants. These prehistoric predators didn’t just bite—they impaled.

Until now, the oldest known ants were around 99 million years old, usually preserved in amber from Myanmar or France. But Vulcanidris pushes the fossil record back another 10 million years, suggesting ants were already scuttling across distant continents far earlier than scientists thought.

“This new find now represents the oldest ant known,” said Phil Barden, an evolutionary biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who wasn’t involved in the research. “It extends the known fossil record for ants by about ten million years.”

That’s a big deal. Ants, one of Earth’s most dominant insect groups today, didn’t start that way. They evolved from the same lineage as wasps and bees during the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods, but didn’t explode in number until after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

This 113-Million-Year-Old ‘Hell Ant’ Fossil Is Now the Oldest Ant Ever Discovered

Micro-CT scans of the fossil revealed some seriously weird traits: more wing veins than modern ants, wasp-like features, and jaws that didn’t pinch sideways like today’s ants. Instead, they extended straight out from the head like alien pincers—likely designed to trap prey with terrifying efficiency.

“It could have worked as a kind of forklift,” Lepeco said in an email to CNN. “The intricate morphology suggests that even these earliest ants had already evolved sophisticated predatory strategies significantly different from their modern counterparts.”

So why did hell ants die out while their tamer cousins thrived? “I wish I could have a time machine,” quipped ant evolutionary expert Corrie Moreau.

Until then, we’ll have to settle for the fossil record—and this ancient, razor-jawed monster that’s now officially the world’s oldest ant.