The fossil may shed new light on that evolutionary question. It's a Snap The animal kingdom has a new champ: the trap-jaw ant has the fastest known bite, besting even the great white shark.

Wood named them “trap-jaw” spiders because their mechanism for catching prey—like that of so-called trap-jaw ants—resembles a mouse trap clamping shut. For the present study, Wood and colleagues ...

An example of the trap-jaw ant escaping by snapping its mandibles against a hard surface to "escape" which launches the ant a few inches into the air How to Distill Texas Whiskey The Incredible ...

The animation shows the changes in form as the trap-jaw mechanism becomes more divergent from the ancestral form. The jaws (yellow) develop small projections that can latch onto the labrum (purple).