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POPSMind-controlling parasites date back millions of years
It maneuvers the insects into biting down on the major veins of the undersides of leaves just before they die the fungus then rapidly grows a stalk from their victims' heads, releasing spores to infect more ants. Now scientists have discovered what might be ancient evidence of such mind-control-induced death grips scars on a roughly 48-million-year-old leaf. "I thought it was a very, very long shot to find such a fossil, but indeed, as luck would have it, two paleobotanists, Conrad Labandeira at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and Torsten Wappler at the Steinmann Institute in Bonn, were sitting around wondering how that particular damage type might be explained," said researcher David Hughes, a behavioral ecologist at Harvard University. The leaf fossil came from what once were subtropical forests around a lake in Germany. The leaf bears 29 dumbbell-shaped scars centered around its veins. These differ from the kinds of snips resulting when insects drink plant sap, an
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