Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson Page A

attempt was led by my former student Robert W. Taylor, who had completed his Ph.D. at Harvard and at the time was a curator of entomology at the national insect collections in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Bob was desperate to make the discovery, to seize this grail for himself and for the honor of Australian entomology. On the way west to dawn ant country, the group camped in a forest of mallee, a kind of shrubby eucalyptus. The night was chilly, and there seemed to be no good reason to search for any insects at all. But Taylor walked out anyway with flashlight in hand, just in case something might be active. A few minutes later he came running back, shouting, “I got the bloody bastard! I got the bloody bastard!” As his words hint, now famous among entomologists, the dawn ant had indeed been found—and if not by an Australian, at least by a New Zealander.
    It turned out that the dawn ant is a winter species. The workers wait in their nests and come out on cool nights to forage for mostly insects, many of which are numbed and easy to catch. The species is part of the ancient Gondwanan fauna, insects and other creatures of which a large part originated in Mesozoic times during the early breakup of the Gondwanan supercontinent and the drift northward of New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Australia. The relict elements, of which the dawn ant is part, are species adapted to the south temperate zone, and sometimes to the cool-temperature regimes of winter. I should have anticipated that possibility when searching in midsummer out of Esperance. But I didn’t.
    With a population of dawn ants located, a flood of studies followed, during which virtually every aspect of the biology and natural history of the species was explored. Dawn ants proved to be elementary in most aspects of their social behavior, but they are not the fundamentally less social creatures we had hoped to find. Like all other known ants, they form colonies with queens and workers. They build nests, forage for food, and raise their sisters. All are cooperating subordinate daughters of the mother queen.
    To discover the origin of all the ants, even taking into account their diminutive stature, is as important as finding the origin of dinosaurs, birds, and even our own distant ancestors among the mammals. I realized that without a satisfactory living link, researchers needed to find the right fossils from the right geological period to make further progress. Until 1966, however, the earliest known fossils were between a relatively youthful fifty million and sixty million years old, by which time, in the early to middle Eocene Period, the ants were already abundant and highly diversified. They were also globally distributed. We had even found an extinct species of dawn ant similar to the living one of Australia, preserved in the Baltic amber of Europe.
    It was all very frustrating. Ants obviously had arisen during the Mesozoic Era, which ended sixty-five million years ago. But for a long time we had not a single Mesozoic specimen. It seemed as though a dark curtain had been lowered over the ancestors and earliest species of these world-dominant insects. Then, in 1966, word came to Harvard that two specimens of what appeared to be ants had been found in ninety-million-year-old amber from a geological deposit in, of all places, not some exotic far-off fossil bed but smack on the shores of New Jersey, and they were on the way for me to examine. At last the curtain might lift! I was so excited that when I fished the amber piece out of the mailing package I fumbled and it dropped to the floor. It broke into two pieces that skittered away from each other. I was aghast. What disaster had I wrought? However, to my great relief each piece contained an entire separate ant, and neither of the fossils had been damaged. When I polished the surface of the pieces into glassy smoothness, I found the external form of the specimens to be preserved almost as though they had been