Many thanks to my coauthors Pierre Cockx, Pablo Aragones Suarez, Ryan McKellar, and Phil Barden, this was a super fun study to conduct!

Lots left to discover: what ultimately drove the stem ants to extinction? How did crown lineages survive? New fossil deposits and methodological approaches may help answer these questions!

Our work reveals comparable longevity between stem and crown ants, and while stem ants demonstrate broad morphological variation, high-density ant morphospace has remained relatively constant over 100 million years.

We combined phylogenetic and morphological evidence to show that while ants experienced a total taxic turnover in the late Cretaceous, this was not accompanied by a major morphological shift, unlike other well-known turnovers such as theropod dinosaurs to birds.

We report here the youngest-yet stem ants from North Carolina, new species from the stem ant genera Sphecomyrma, Brownimecia, and Baikuris.

During the late Cretaceous, a large-scale faunal turnover occurred, where stem ants vanished from the fossil record and crown ants continued to diversify into the forms we see today. But the mechanisms and conditions underlying this transition remain unknown.

All modern ants descend from the same common ancestor that lived in the early to mid-Cretaceous. However, we know that alongside crown ant ancestors there lived bizarre and wonderful 'stem ants', lineages closely related to our ants but ones that left no descendants.

New fossil ants, insight into ant faunal turnover, and the persistence of the "platonic ant body plan"! Our paper on the youngest-yet stem ants from the Cretaceous, preserved in ~77 Ma North Carolina amber, is now out in Current Biology https://t.co/9Dfb4mKBr5

This paper has been a labour of love for many (so many) years and I am happier than I can say to see it in print - many thanks to my coauthors @TJanovitz, @Haidomyrmex, Vincent Perrichot, and John Paul Timonera, and many others who made this work happen!

We also provide a pipeline for ecomorphological modeling and prediction, and assess the potential and pitfalls of such a method - we hope that this will have broad applications beyond just ants!

We compared their predicted ecologies to the ecology of solitary-foraging predatory lineages today and find broad ecospace coherence, suggesting that these lineages represent echoes of their Cretaceous counterparts.

Using machine learning models trained on extant ecomorphological data, we find support for leaf litter and ground nesting and foraging in this early ant lineage, with some support for arboreality and omnivory.

Very (VERY) excited to say that our paper on hell ant ecology is now out as Just Accepted at @ASNAmNat! We employ machine learning techniques to assess the likely ecology of hell ants, a lineage of bizarre Cretaceous predators. https://t.co/rPAVwrg3Y2

Glad to see this paper out - such a fascinating fossil and really great to work with such a cool team! Congrats @SawhIndira!

Walkouts for better early career researcher funding are happening across Canada! Inflation has eaten away at the scholarships, fellowships, and grants over the last 20 years. It’s time for change @cafreeland @JustinTrudeau #SupportOurScience

HELL ANTS IN T-4 HOURS

NATIONWIDE WALKOUT: If you think 🇨🇦 grad students & post docs deserve more funding from @JustinTrudeau & @cafreeland through awards & grants then join #SupportOurScience & walkout on May 1 #mayday #budget2023 Watch for more details here & at https://t.co/rs2nDecEkM on TUESDAY

Thesis submitted and the date is set! I will be defending April 18th at 1pm EST (so if you're sick and tired of your taxes, this might be a nice break). DM me if you'd like the link!

This has been a rough ride and we very much regret the error, but hope that we can set the record straight. We're grateful for the reports of other mislabeled copal that helped us clarify the issue. The full retraction can be found here:

We conducted further FTIR spectroscopy tests on our specimen and found that it lacks the spectra commonly associated with Baltic amber and is thus most likely a recent army ant preserved in copal. (4/5)