Signed, Lisa - Bowdon Junction. Apart from the occasional sting, ants are truly amazing creatures. According to scientists, they have changed very little during their evolution. Recently, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History discovered a fossilized ant they estimated at 92 million years old. With this new discovery, many scientists believe that ants actually roamed the world during the time of the dinosaurs.
Ants are social insects which mean they live together in groups just like bees and wasps.
At some time in grade school, one of our teachers probably talked about ants during a science class. They probably explained that groups of ants are called colonies, and that in a colony, hundreds of thousands of individuals work gathering food and build underground tunnels for the colony to live in. They probably also explained that each colony is started from a single queen ant that is the mother to every ant in the mound. While this is true in most cases, some species of ants live very different lives than this. For example the army ant of South America doesn't have an underground mound.