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.
Rabeling and his colleagues named the ant Martialis heureka (“ant from Mars”) because they’d never seen an ant like it before.
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