The idea of examining the fossil record for evidence of the distinctive bite marks came to David Hughes, a behavioural ecologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as he was sitting in on a palaeobotany undergraduate course. He had just returned from fieldwork in southern Thailand where he had been studying fungal parasites infecting carpenter ants and controlling their behaviour. “Could this parasitic relationship have evolved much earlier in Earth’s history?” he asked himself.

“The distinctive pattern of the bite marks and their association with the veins of the leaf is actually quite striking and unusual to see in fossil leaves,” says Paul Kenrick, head of research at the Natural History Museum’s Department of Palaeontology in London. “This find is telling us something significant about the evolution of the interactions between organisms and their dependencies.” If the marks are those left by dying ants, the complex ant–parasite relationship must have evolved at least 48 million years ago, he says.

-NATURE MAGAZINE-

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