Cretaceous Cenomanian Leaf Cutter Ant (?) Please Id

[Amber Fluid Neutral]

I am at a loss on how to verify if this is a leaf cutter ant. If it is it is far older than anything yet discovered on leaf cutter ants.  Notice the square shaped leaf fragment near its face.  I don't know what it might be if not the ant's prize.  Science says that these insects started to cultivate fungus in the tertiary.  Advice?  

 

 

[ynot]

Welcome to TFF!

If it is a real piece of amber then it is a good possibility and could be a important discovery.

It would need to be looked at by an entomologist that can differentiate ant species.

[Carl]

Here's what I got from ant AND amber expert Dr. Phil Barden of the New Jersey Institute of Technology:

 

If it’s Burmese amber, then it looks like Gerontoformica – the most common genus in that amber, there are about 12 or so species described to date. In the first two pictures, it does look like the worker is carrying the leaf, but in the last image, it looks much more likely that the leaf is just incidentally “behind" the head of the ant and so gives the illusion of carrying the leaf. Hard to say for sure without looking myself or with higher res images though! Cool!

 

And the poster is right, leaf cutting/fungus farming behavior is not thought to exist in the Cretaceous.