Ants and termites take over the ground
Two lineages of social insects appear and go on to outweigh every other land animal group.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 20 million years
- Known to
- ± 10 million years
- Era
- Cretaceous, Mesozoic
Ants and termites both originate in the Cretaceous — termites from within the cockroaches, ants from among the wasps — and both build societies with sterile castes, which converts a colony into something closer to a single organism than a crowd. Early ants such as Sphecomyrma are rare in Cretaceous amber, suggesting they remained a minor part of the fauna at first; their explosive rise comes later, alongside angiosperm forests. Today social insects dominate terrestrial invertebrate biomass and do much of the world's soil turnover and decomposition.