Be thankful that you don't live 50 million years ago, or you'd have to use a baseball bat instead of a shoe to kill this ant:
A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere, says paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
The new species, Titanomyrma lubei, is related to giant ants previously found in German fossils. These long-distance relatives bolster the notion that the climate of the time had hot blips that allowed warmth-loving giant insects to spread from continent to continent, Archibald and a U.S.-Canada team propose online May 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Also, has anyone looked into Pangaea being the reason it is related to the German ant fossils?
I'm not belittling the heebie-jeebie effect if a time-traveller goes back 50 million years and stumbles over an ant-hill of these things.
Which reminds me of a crackpot theory of mine which even I don't take seriously, but I'm going to mention it anyway.
At various times we see fossils of giant insects like dragonflies.
What if the fossilization process causes them to swell, sort of like the way a true Gummi Bear will get bigger if you leave it in a glass of water overnight?
By extrapolation, maybe huge dinosaur fossils were actually the size of cattle in life.