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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesAnts did not all make it through the extinction that ended the reign of non-avian dinosaurs. Some ancient ant lineages disappeared, but the broader group persisted. A leading explanation is that flowering-plant ecosystems offered ants a range of habitats and resources that helped buffer them through environmental upheaval. Fossils establish that ant lineages existed both before and after the event; they do not prove a single trait saved them.
What does it mean that ants survived?
The end-Cretaceous mass extinction, about 66 million years ago, eliminated all non-avian dinosaurs. Birds are living dinosaurs, but they are not the subject of the ant-survival evidence discussed here.
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Ant survival means the ant lineage continued, not that every kind of Cretaceous ant persisted. Scientists distinguish stem ants, early branches with no living descendants, from crown ants, the lineages ancestral to ants alive today. Stem ants were present in the Cretaceous and appear to have disappeared around the extinction boundary. Crown ants were already around before it.
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A 2024 study by Sosiak and colleagues reports stem ants in North Carolina amber dated to about 77 million years ago, documenting their persistence relatively close to the boundary. A separate study found crown-ant subfamilies in central Myanmar amber dated to about 72.1 million years ago. Together, these records show that early and modern-ancestor ant lineages coexisted before the extinction, followed by a turnover in which some branches vanished while others endured. Sosiak et al., Current Biology, 2024; Nature Communications, 2018.
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The fossil record near the boundary is incomplete, so it cannot pinpoint exactly when or why particular stem-ant groups disappeared. It also does not show that ants were immune to the catastrophe.
How flowering plants may have buffered ants
A 2024 study, The Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution buffered ants against extinction, argues that the spread of flowering plants transformed terrestrial ecosystems in ways that likely gave ants ecological options. Forest leaf litter, soil, and arboreal habitats—including nesting sites in trees—offered places to live and forage as vegetation and food webs changed. A wider range of resources and habitats may have helped ant populations persist even as some lineages were lost.
The study combines fossil and living-ant occurrence data: its dataset contains approximately 24,000 fossil-ant occurrences and 14,000 occurrences of living ants. These are records in the dataset, not counts of species or colonies that survived the extinction. The authors use the evidence to test explanations for ant diversification; it supports ecological buffering as a plausible explanation, not proof that flowering plants alone caused ant survival. The 2024 study.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchAn earlier synthesis likewise linked ant expansion to the rise of flowering plants, describing a broad shift from ground litter and soil into the canopy and other environments, alongside changes in diet. That history suggests flexibility in where ants lived and what resources they used, rather than one decisive adaptation. Moreau et al., 2005.
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Why the exact cause remains uncertain
There is no established single survival trait that explains the outcome. The direct evidence concerns which lineages appear in fossils before and after the boundary; the proposed explanation concerns how changing plant communities may have diversified ants’ habitats and resources. Because the boundary record is patchy, the evidence cannot reconstruct the fate of individual colonies or prove that every surviving lineage benefited in the same way.
Broader work on end-Cretaceous food webs and survivorship examines how ecological change shaped extinction and recovery, but it is not direct proof of the ant-specific mechanism. Science Advances, 2022.
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