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Encased in a clear piece of Dominican amber, the winged queen preserves the same compact body shape seen in her living<\/a> relatives today.<\/p>\n Studying the specimen, Dr. Gianpiero Fiorentino at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT<\/a>) documented the defining traits that place it within that globally distributed genus.<\/p>\n Features of the head, mandibles, and body closely match living Caribbean species, showing that this lineage already resembled its present-day relatives 16 million years ago.<\/p>\n Because fossil<\/a> representatives of Hypoponera are almost unknown, that resemblance raises deeper questions about how such a widespread group left so little trace in the amber<\/a> record.<\/p>\n Clues from winged ants<\/p>\n Winged queens carry traits that worker ants never show, so fossil queens can confuse even experienced ant identifiers.<\/p>\n Unlike workers, a queen must fly and start a colony, so her body grows larger eyes and sturdier wing muscles.<\/p>\n Fiorentino noted that scientists study workers far more often, which makes matching a fossil queen to living species harder.<\/p>\n Without fossils of workers from the same group, the queen<\/a> alone cannot settle every branch on the family tree.<\/p>\n Taxonomy by elimination<\/p>\n Sorting this ant group into species depends on taxonomy, the science of naming and grouping organisms.<\/p>\n In the new fossil, Fiorentino faced a genus that often lacks obvious markers, so experts identify it by elimination.<\/p>\n On one University of Utah key<\/a>, the group\u2019s plain look even earned a famous joke.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Ponerinae is a Mr. Potato Head game, Hypoponera is the potato,\u201d said Dr. John Longino, an entomologist at the University of Utah.<\/p>\n Amber\u2019s built-in bias<\/p>\n Resin oozes down trunks and branches, so amber captures many tree-dwelling insects and misses much of the forest floor.<\/p>\n By comparing modern resins<\/a> with amber fossils, researchers measured taphonomic bias, meaning the record overrepresents some habitats.<\/p>\n For ants, that bias tilts toward species that patrol bark and branches, while soil hunters spend their time below.<\/p>\n Finding a ground-hunting Hypoponera queen in amber suggests many soil and leaf-litter ants stayed invisible in past collections.<\/p>\n Caribbean time capsule<\/p>\n Dominican amber formed when tree resin hardened, then slowly changed into stone-like material as it sat under sediments.<\/p>\n Warm coastal forests once covered Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and resin dripped there for ages.<\/p>\n Within that amber, insects froze at the moment of entrapment, sometimes keeping hairs, wings, and even microbes on their bodies.<\/p>\n For the Miocene, an epoch spanning 23 to 5 million years ago, Dominican amber ranks among the richest insect fossil archives.<\/p>\n Gaps in ant evolution<\/p>\n Until this queen came to light, only one fossil from this ant group had ever been formally named, and it was discovered in Baltic amber in northern Europe.<\/p>\n Describers first labeled that specimen in 1868, then later scientists moved it into Hypoponera as Hypoponera atavia in 2002.<\/p>\n Across today\u2019s tropics, living Hypoponera includes more than 150 species, yet fossils remain rare enough to count on one hand.<\/p>\n That gap leaves long stretches of ant history blank, especially for small species that spend most of their lives underground.<\/p>\n Clues in body parts<\/p>\n Close inspection showed a queen that looked surprisingly familiar, with body proportions much like modern Caribbean Hypoponera.<\/p>\n Her mandibles, the hard jaws ants use for gripping, carried seven or eight large teeth in the fossil.<\/p>\n Instead of odd, ancient shapes, the head and body resembled living species already documented on Caribbean islands.<\/p>\n Similarity hints that some ant<\/a> lineages can hold steady for millions of years, even as islands and climates change.<\/p>\n Digital fossil archive<\/p>\n At NJIT, the team used X-rays to build a three-dimensional view of the queen\u2019s shape without cutting amber.<\/p>\n The NJIT scans acted like medical computed tomography, X-ray slices stacked into three-dimensional images, but tuned for a speck-sized fossil.<\/p>\n Digital files from the scans now sit in an open repository<\/a>, letting other scientists check measurements without handling amber.<\/p>\n Sharing that kind of data can speed future comparisons, especially when another rare queen appears in a private collection.<\/p>\n Correcting the record<\/p>\n Modern surveys find Hypoponera in soil and leaf litter, the loose layer of dead leaves on ground, across many forests.<\/p>\n In one global set of 110 samples, researchers found these ants in 75% of leaf-litter collections from five continents.<\/p>\n Such everyday abundance makes their near absence in amber stand out, reinforcing how a single fossil can correct a skewed record.<\/p>\n Still, one queen cannot reveal whether ancient Caribbean Hypoponera lived on one island or spread widely.<\/p>\n Implications for ant evolution<\/p>\n A rare amber queen now anchors Hypoponera in the Miocene Caribbean and highlights what the fossil record tends to miss.<\/p>\n Future finds and better maps of living species will decide whether this queen marks long-term stability or a vanished branch.<\/p>\n The study is published in the Journal of Paleontology<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read?\u00a0Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a>\u00a0for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on\u00a0EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by\u00a0Eric Ralls<\/a>\u00a0and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 16-million-year-old ant queen trapped in amber has revealed the first fossil trace of her kind in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-146511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}