The oldest known range of ants are between 100 and 78 million years old . Some sources speak of them as ants from hell or the devil because of the appearance of their jaws and mouthparts and were described from six fossils found in different deposits of Laurasia (an ancient land mass of the northern hemisphere that emerged towards the end of the Jurassic from the disintegration of the supercontinent Pangea) and in a single locality in Botswana, in Africa . Only two of the 45 named and recorded species from the Cretaceous Period can be unequivocally assigned to currently existing lineages of the Formicidae group. Most primitive species are different from modern lineages . They gather modern features with other plesiomorphic or ancestral ones. All Cretaceous ants possess a narrow segment and a distinctive gland (the metapleural gland) visible. Also, many primitive ants exhibited shortened viewing antennae and often a highly demarcated hardened scytho or plate of cuticle that does not exist in modern species. These features are most likely plesiomorphic, typical of Cretaceous species belonging to lineages that appeared before the common ancestor of all current ants. Finally, these primitive ants became extinct sometime between the Late Cretaceous and the Paleocene, so the only window to study those lineages, their morphology and behavior lies in the fossil specimens.
It is known that some of those ancestral groups developed and exhibited a wide catalog of adaptive traits, most of them related to the mouth and its parts . The Haidomyrmecine group of ants, characterized by their unique scythe-shaped jaw, is known from four genera and six species described in Myanmar, Charente (France) and Canada and preserved in amber . Thus they are among the oldest as well as among the most recent deposits of the Cretaceous spanning a temporal spectrum of 22 million years and what today are three continents. Hell ants are believed to have held a prominent position among the Formicidae , related to all other ants. This does not indicate that the common ancestor of all ants possessed such specialized mouthparts, but the enigmatic Cretaceous species provide a clue to some adaptive traits that have been lost and feeding strategies, since today’s ants lack them.
Now a new prehistoric species of hell ant has been discovered whose anatomy and habits answered its diabolical name , including a deadly metal-reinforced hunting and feeding device. Instead of normal mouths, these prehistoric creatures featured bladed faces . No ant that exists today has these traits. However, some hairs have been preserved around the mouth that suggests that they could be reminiscent of those terrifying oral appliances. Some even had a kind of horn-shaped appendage on the jaw . Among these is the newly discovered species, named Linguamyrmex vladi , which Phillip Barden and his colleagues at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark found preserved in amber from 98 million years ago.
This creature impaled another insect, its prey, on the horn using its blade-like jaws . In addition, a CT scan has revealed that Linguamyrmex vladi’s horn is reinforced with metal. This metal reinforcement probably helped keep the horn intact, according to Vincent Perrichot of the French University of Rennes, who in 2016 published a description of another horned hell ant he called a unicorn ant. Barden agrees that it makes sense for that appendage to be reinforced, since the horn had to receive frequent blows from the jaws. Some current insects avoid or reduce wear in a similar way, by reinforcing their jaws with metals such as zinc and iron .
In addition to wearing a unicorn with metal reinforcement, L. vladi could be a kind of vampire, because when it raises its jaws, they form a channel that would allow them to suck the blood of other insects. Along with the ant, Barden and his team found a well-preserved beetle larva, probably destined to be the next item on the ant’s menu. If anything, the Myanmar amber deposits where Linguamyrmex vladi was found are so rich that they promise new surprises and finds.
