Ant The Size Of Hummingbird Fossil Discovered In Wyoming
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
Imagine an ant so large it could tear your flesh. Now imagine an entire colony of them descending upon you in your sleep.
You wake up almost instantly as the shifting weight of a cadre of insect killers disturbs your dreams. Terror creeps quickly as you come back to the terrifying reality.
You brush off as many as you can, frantically running your hands over your arms and legs while stamping madly on the ground. But your feet can’t crush these resilient bastards. They regroup and circle around your position. This time they try and climb you from the back of your legs.
This is how you die. Cold. Alone. Mutilated by a creature no longer alive in your native time.
Now: be happy you didn’t live 50 million years ago, when these things really existed.
At about 2 inches (5 cm) long, the specimen is a “monstrously big ant,” said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.
Massive ants of this size have been found before but not in America. It remains a mystery how they arrived there.
