ANTOMATIC

ant from Mars

Thanks a lot, MSNBC. I hadn’t had any coffee when I saw their headline, “Strange ‘ant from Mars’ discovered
Blind, subterranean predator likely a descendant of Earth’s first ants”.

A newly discovered species of a blind, subterranean predator — dubbed the “Ant from Mars” — is likely a descendant of one of the very first ants to evolve on Earth, a new study finds.

Christian Rabeling, an evolutionary biology graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, found the only known specimen of the new ant species in dead plant material on the ground in the Amazon rainforest at the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria in Manaus, Brazil, in 2003.

I’m slightly disappointed they didn’t really find Martian ants. But only slightly…