A flying ant with a wingspan half-a-foot long and the body mass of a small bird flew over Canadian soil some 50 million years ago. Scientists are researching the first Canadian specimen, recently found by a resident of Princeton, British Columbia.
Scientists are stumped on how this ant travelled between continents. It was found in Europe, and another fossil from Wyoming was found in 2011.
“This raises the questions of how these ancient insects travelled between continents to appear on both sides of the Atlantic at nearly the same time.”
While land still connected the continents across the Arctic 50 million years ago, the climate would not likely have been suitable for an ant migration, Archibald and his colleague Rolf Mathewes said.
The ancient Arctic was warmer than today’s, but still likely too cold for these ants.
The largest ants today are found in warmer regions. And scientists have thought these ants to prefer a warmer climate as well. The B.C. discovery, however, calls that into question.
The new specimen is further north than scientists expected to find Titanomyrma. After the Wyoming specimen was found, researchers predicted that no specimens would be found in the temperate Canadian uplands because the climate would be too cold for them.
Researchers at the time hypothesized that there may have been brief intervals of global warming called “hyperthermals,” and that the Arctic may have temporarily warmed enough for the ants to cross before cooling down again.
The Canadian fossil is distorted in a way that makes it hard to judge its true size. “If it was a smaller species, was it adapted to this region of cooler climate by reduction in size and gigantic species were excluded as we predicted back in 2011?” Archibald asked.
“Or were they huge, and our idea of the climatic tolerance of gigantic ants, and so how they crossed the Arctic, was wrong?”
He concluded, “For now, it remains a mystery.” He said more fossils will need to be found to solve it.
