The ant from Mars

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 months 1 week (www.nature.com)

It is so new, and so bizarre, that uber-naturalist E. O. Wilson has christened it "the ant from Mars." Martialis heureka, a native of the Brazilian Amazon, is the founding member of a new subfamily of ants. It adds a new branch to the ant family tree which split off from the others extremely early in the family's evolution. "It could represent a 'relict' species that retained some ancestral morphological characteristics," says discoverer Christian Rabeling, a graduate student in integrative biology at the University of Texas in Austin

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