Judy Turner, age 13, of College Park, Ga., for her question:

Are ants prehistoric?

That word prehistoric is a tricky one. On the face of it, it means before history. But the word history has a number of slightly different meanings. It is closely related to the words story and information. Basically, history is a series of facts in orderly sequence. There is the history of the earth and the history of this or that animal dating back to his remote ancestors,

There is also the history of mankind. And this history has a special meaning. Strictly speaking, it dates from when man learned to write and keep records of his own story. The history of mankind dates from only 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. Everything before this is prehistory or prehistoric. And the word prehistoric should not be used in any other sense. Anything that happened before man learned to keep records is, in the proper sense, prehistoric.

The story of the ants goes back way into prehistoric times. In fact, the few thousand years of mints history are but a short time in the long life story of the ant. We do not know exactly when ants developed into their present form. But vie do know that ants have been living on earth for at least sixty million years.

We know this for a fact because some of their remote ancestors left their fossil remains. These tiny fossil bodies are preserved in ancient amber. These ants lived in the piney forests around the Baltic Sea in Eocene and Oligocene times. The piney trees gave off resin dust as pine trees do today. Sometimes a sticky gob of tangy resin oozed from a wound in one of these ancient trees.

Maybe a little ant crawled up to investigate and got herself trapped in the gooey gob of resin. In time, the soft rosin hardened into amber. And the body of the little ant was forever imprisoned in a golden, glassy tomb.

Lumps of amber containing these ant fossils often were washed up on the Baltic shores. It is possible to study these little creatures in their glassy tornus. It glassy tombs. It seems that the modern ant has changed vary little from her distant ancestors

Today there are over 2,500 different types of ant on earth. They enjoy life from the Arctic to the equators in marshes, meadows and deserts, in valleys and high up in the mountains. There are about 400 different kinds of ants in North America. All ants are social insects. They live in colonies whore each member knows and performs its special duties.

The prehistoric ants were not much different from their modern descendants. Several varieties occur in the ancient ember. The ono most common resembles our Formica Fusca, a dark ant who is a close relative to the carpenter ant.

Sixty million years ago the ants had a successful way of life and they have had no reason to change it. They were established when the first mammals arrived on earth. They saw the flying reptiles and the last of the giant dinosaurs. And ants then, when the ancestor of the horse was a three‑toed animal not much bigger than a dog, were much the same as they are today.