For half a century, finding this ant was the great white whale of insect science. Nothomyrmecia macrops - the dinosaur ant, a creature so primitive it looks like an insect that wandered out of the age of the dinosaurs - had been described from two specimens in 1934 and then promptly lost. Decade after decade, expeditions failed. Giants of the field, including E. O. Wilson, the most famous ant scientist who ever lived, went looking and came back empty-handed. The animal seemed almost mythical. Then, on the night of 22 October 1977, a research party broke down beside a tiny grain town on the Eyre Peninsula, and one of them took a walk in the dark. Twenty paces from the stranded trucks, he started yelling. The lost ant — missing for forty-six years — had just been found at Poochera.
To understand the fuss, you have to understand what Nothomyrmecia is. It is a 'living fossil', the sole survivor of an ancient lineage, retaining features that vanished from almost every other ant tens of millions of years ago: large staring eyes, long slender jaws, a simple body plan straight out of the Cretaceous. It is the closest thing on Earth to seeing what the first ants might have looked like. A pale yellow nocturnal hunter, it forages alone up tree trunks on cold nights, snatching prey by sight - behaviour utterly unlike the swarming, scent-trailing colonies most ants form. For evolutionary biologists, it is a window into the deep origins of one of the most successful animal groups in history. Which is why, when it disappeared for forty-six years, finding it again became something like an obsession.
The 1977 expedition had not even meant to come this way. Led by the entomologist Robert Taylor, the team had set out from Canberra to drive more than 3,000 kilometres west, all the way to the remote site near the Western Australian coast where the original specimens had turned up in the 1930s. With a thousand kilometres still to go, vehicle trouble forced them to camp in the scrub near Poochera. After dark, Taylor strolled off among the trees - and within about twenty steps spotted a familiar shape climbing a trunk. His shout has become legend in entomological circles: "The bloody bastard's here! I've got the Notho-bloody-myrmecia!" The ant that Wilson and others had hunted for decades, that had defeated every careful search, turned up by pure accident more than a thousand kilometres from where anyone was looking, beside a broken-down truck.
Poochera has embraced its strange fame completely. This is, quite possibly, the only town in the world that runs on ant-based tourism. Images of Nothomyrmecia are stencilled onto the streets, the creature has been adopted as the community's emblem, and myrmecologists - ant specialists - still make the long journey here as a kind of pilgrimage to the spot where the living fossil came back from the dead. The town's pride is tinged with care, because the ant remains desperately rare. It is now known from a scatter of sites across the Eyre Peninsula and is listed by the IUCN as critically endangered, a survivor of a hundred million years that could still slip away on our watch. For a town of a few dozen people, hosting one of the planet's most precious insects is no small responsibility.
Strip away the ants and Poochera is a classic Eyre Peninsula grain town, and its ordinary history has its own quiet weight. The townsite was not surveyed until 1920, and its name is believed to come from King Poojeri, a local Aboriginal man who died in 1917; a nearby hill carries the name too. The school opened in 1920 and closed for good in 1976, the kind of arc that tells the whole story of a small farming community's rise and contraction. Trains once mattered here: Poochera sits on the narrow-gauge Eyre Peninsula Railway, though regular passenger services ended in 1968. Today it survives as a grain exchange point for the surrounding wheat and sheep country and a handy stop for travellers bound for the rugged Gawler Ranges, some 53 kilometres away - a hotel, a caravan park, a roadhouse, and the most celebrated ant in the world.
Poochera lies at about 32.72 degrees south, 134.83 degrees east, in the grain belt of the Eyre Peninsula, roughly 60 kilometres northwest of Streaky Bay and inland from the Great Australian Bight. From the air it is a small grid of streets in a vast patchwork of wheat and grazing paddocks, with the thin line of the Eyre Peninsula Railway and the highway running through, and the rugged Gawler Ranges rising to the northeast about 53 kilometres away. There is no commercial airfield at the town itself; the nearest options are Streaky Bay Airport (YSKY) to the southwest for general aviation and Ceduna Airport (YCDU) to the west for scheduled flights, with Port Lincoln Airport (YPLC) further southeast. The flat, open farmland makes for clear sightlines, and the surrounding scrub-and-paddock mosaic is the kind of country where, after dark, the dinosaur ant still hunts.