Stained Ant (genus) Basiceros) Although widely distributed, they rarely encounter members of neotropical ecosystems. Their rarity is attributed to their cryptic lifestyle habits. These ants are common names because they have special hairs that help to adhere soil and garbage particles to their skin. Paleontologists have just discovered the first fossils of this genus group, Basiceros enanain Miocene Dominican Amber.
Illustration of the volume rendering and measurement process taken using volume rendering Basiceros enana. Image credit: Fiorentino et al. , doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2171.
Measurement of 5.13 mm length, Basiceros enana Caribbean species are the smallest in the entire lineage, as they are considerably smaller than modern relatives, which can reach approximately 9 mm in length.
“The fossil adult worker ants provide direct evidence that the sacred ant group of ants once lived on Caribbean islands. They then result in local extinction during the Miocene era (230,550,000 years ago)” Candidate New Jersey Institute of Technology.
“Dirty is a rare find in the wild. Finding something today is exciting considering how hidden they are, but being caught in amber and it’s like finding a diamond.”
“This fossil is different from all its modern relatives and changes the evolutionary history of Basiceros. ”
Until now, Basiceros The ants were only known in the neo-rainforest, which stretched from Costa Rica to southern Brazil.
The genus contains a total of nine living species today, but the unexpected fossil discovery raises new questions about how the ANT group reached its current habitat.
“In many cases, lineages seem like a rather simple biogeographic history. If you find a group of animals that lived in South America until today’s Costa Rica, there’s no reason to expect their early relatives to live in the Caribbean.”
“Such fossils highlight how the distribution of living species can believe in the complex evolutionary history of life on our planet.”
Using advanced imaging and 3D reconstruction techniques, researchers studied Basiceros enana detail.
They compared the physical properties of the specimen with the physical properties of all known modern stain ant species and conducted molecular dating analyses to track their evolutionary lineage.
“The use of Micro-CT scans allowed us to actually amplify this study and capture features that we could virtually not see what we didn’t,” Fiorentino says.
“Amber stores the entire organism in three dimensions, allowing you to extract a large amount of data even from small ants,” added Dr. Baden.
“Our results show that the embodied these ants was relatively rapid,” Fiorentino said.
“They have almost doubled over the course of 20 million years.”
“As previous hypotheses suggested that these ants were large and shrinking over time to their ancestors, this really shows how important fossils are to understand the evolution of the lineage.”
but, Basiceros enana It also suggests some of the same adaptations that were already introduced at least 16 million years ago for environmental predators and prey (a ability known as Crypsis).
These characteristics include two layers of special hair (or bristles) that allow the body to attach soil and leaf waste particles. Longer upright brush bristles and shorter, shorter, pressed retaining hairs that trap particles in the deformation or cuticle.
“What this shows is that being dead and hiding is rewarded,” Fiorentino said.
“The discovery of such unique fossils does not guarantee that the presence of these properties will necessarily act this way, but discovering such unique fossils helps us understand how long we have been using this strategy.”
Fossil ants also have other distinctive morphological properties like today’s dirt, including predatory features such as the elevated Perodal spine, trapezoidal-like head structure, and the mandible with 12 triangular teeth.
Despite these specialized adaptations, ancient Caribbean stains eventually disappeared from the region amid major Miocene ecological changes.
“The existence of Basiceros In Amber, Dominican, ancient land bridges suggest that these ants may have provided a route to travel from the mainland into the Caribbean,” Dr. Baden said.
“This fossil is part of a big puzzle that will help us understand why some groups of living things are extinct and others stick out for millions of years.”
“Their extinction could be accompanied by the loss of available niches and interspecies competition,” Fioretino said.
“These ants are predators, and the overall trend seen from the Caribbean is the loss of predator ants’ diversity.”
“More than a third of the Ants have been extinct on modern Dominican Republic Island since the formation of Dominican amber.”
“Understanding what has driven this pattern of local extinction is important to mitigate modern human-driven extinctions and protect biodiversity.”
Team’s paper It was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society b.
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Gianpiero Fiorentino et al. 2025. Increased fossil-based patterns of body size and local extinction Basiceros Stain ants (membrane: gumicidae). Proc. R. Soc. b 292 (2045): 20242171; doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2171
Source: www.sci.news
