Ants lived alongside the dinosaurs.
Ants evolved some 130 million years ago during the early Cretaceous period. Most fossil evidence of insects is found in lumps of ancient amber, or fossilized plant resin. The oldest known ant fossil, a primitive and now extinct ant species named Sphercomyrma freyi, was found in Cliffwood Beach, NJ. Though that fossil only dates back 92 million years, another fossil ant that proved nearly as old has a clear lineage to ants of present day. All this suggests a much longer evolutionary line than previously thought, leading scientists to estimate the appearance of ants on Earth as somewhere around 130 million years ago.
The Sphercomyrma freyi fossil, discovered in 1967, shows a very primitive ant encased in amber, or fossilized tree sap.
Fossils in amber are particularly valuable because of the details they preserve. This fossil is 90-95 million years old...far older than any ant fossil previously known. Thus it is important in extending the fossil record of ants much further back in time.
But that is not its only importance: this fossil was predicted. In work in the 1950s, E.O. Wilson of Harvard University proposed that since ants were apparently evolutionarily derived from wasps, the most primitive ants should show a range of traits intermediate between wasps and modern ants.
At the time Wilson made his prediction, no fossils were old enough to illustrate the transition that he forecast, and in fact, it was more than a decade before the confirming fossil shown here was discovered. Strikingly, all traits but two of this fossil conformed to Wilson's prediction, thus strongly supporting the ants-from-wasps hypothesis.
http://tsjok45.multiply.com/photos/album/1794/MIEREN_
