50 million years ago, ants the size of birds roamed the world. How could they have been so gigantic?
Ant fossils from tens of millions of years ago have been discovered in Canada. They belong to a prehistoric genus of giant ants. That is, the largest ants that ever walked the Earth.
Ants are mobile and ubiquitous. They are not associated with large sizes. On the contrary: they are small enough to fit into any crevice. This makes it easy for them to get into our apartments and houses, among other places.
However, the ants we know from today’s Earth are lilliputians. At least compared to their extinct relatives of the genus Titanomyrma. They are a variety of prehistoric giant ants from the Eocene. That is, the period that began about 56 million and ended 34 million years ago.
Dinosaurs were no longer on Earth at that time. In the ecological niches vacated by them, mammals developed intensively. In turn, huge ants roamed at their feet. Dating back to the Eocene, a fossil of the world’s largest ant, named Titanomyrma gigantea, was found in Germany.
The queens of this species were five centimeters in length, with a wingspan of several centimeters and a body weight of a grosbeak. The worker ants were half that size — which still means that their body length reached three centimeters.
