Prolonged faunal turnover in earliest ants revealed by North American Cretaceous amber

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-22-2024

Abstract

All ∼14,000 extant ant species descended from the same common ancestor, which lived ∼140–120 million years ago (Ma).1,2 While modern ants began to diversify in the Cretaceous, recent fossil evidence has demonstrated that older lineages concomitantly occupied the same ancient ecosystems.3 These early-diverging ant lineages, or stem ants, left no modern descendants; however, they dominated the fossil record throughout the Cretaceous until their ultimate extinction sometime around the K-Pg boundary. Even as stem ant lineages appear to be diverse and abundant throughout the Cretaceous, the extent of their longevity in the fossil record and circumstances contributing to their extinction remain unknown.3 Here we report the youngest stem ants, preserved in ∼77 Ma Cretaceous amber from North Carolina, which illustrate unexpected morphological stability and lineage persistence in this enigmatic group, rivaling the longevity of contemporary ants. Through phylogenetic reconstruction and morphometric analyses, we find evidence that total taxic turnover in ants was not accompanied by a fundamental morphological shift, in contrast to other analogous stem extinctions such as theropod dinosaurs. While stem taxa showed broad morphological variation, high-density ant morphospace remained relatively constant through the last 100 million years, detailing a parallel, but temporally staggered, evolutionary history of modern and stem ants.

Identifier

85189494271 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Current Biology

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.058

e-ISSN

18790445

ISSN

09609822

PubMed ID

38521061

First Page

1755

Last Page

1761.e6

Issue

8

Volume

34

Grant

2015-00681

Fund Ref

Mitacs

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