1967] 
Wilson , Carpenter , Brown — Mesozoic Ants 
5 
In 1966 Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Frey, of Mountainside, New 
Jersey, while collecting mineralogical specimens in the Magothy ex- 
posure at the beach bluffs, Cliff wood, New Jersey, found a relatively 
large piece of amber containing several insects. The amber, when 
discovered, was imbedded in the clay bank. Professor Donald 
Baird of Princeton University reported the find to one of us 
(F.M.C.) and eventually Mr. David Stager of the Newark Museum 
kindly arranged for the loan of the specimen by Mr. and Mrs. Frey. 
All who are interested in insect evolution are indebted to Mr. and 
Mrs. Frey for their alertness in discovering the amber and especially 
for their full cooperation in allowing the amber inclusions to be 
prepared and studied. Important as these insects are, the knowledge 
that insects actually occur in this Cretaceous amber is of even greater 
significance. In all probability much of the amber previously col- 
lected contained insects that were simply not detected. Efforts are 
now being made to examine earlier collections of the amber from 
the Magothy and Raritan Formations and also to obtain new material 
by collecting at the several exposures of these two beds. 
The Magothy Formation, in which this fossiliferous piece of amber 
was found, has exposures in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, 
Long Island and other islands of the southern New England coast. 
It consists mainly of light-colored sands, with layers of gray or dark 
brown clays. Leaf impressions, lignite and the amber occur in the 
clay beds. The Magothy Formation has been referred consistently 
to the lower part of the Upper Cretaceous (Turonian-Coniacian 
stages). Resting on the Raritan, which lies at the bottom of the Upper 
Cretaceous, it was presumably deposited not long after mid-Cretaceous 
times, about 100 million years ago. The plants in the Magothy For- 
mation have been studied chiefly by Berry (1904, 1905, 1906, 1907) 
but his generic determinations are not generally accepted by botanists 
at the present time. More recently, pollen and spores in the Magothy 
have been investigated by Groot, Penny and Groot (1961) and by 
Stover (1964). Certain cones and twigs in the Magothy clays almost 
certainly belong to Sequoia (Berry, 1905; Flollick, 1905) or re- 
lated genera. There is good evidence that such trees produced 
most of the amber now found in the Magothy. Knowlton (1896) 
reported that a lignitic log about 4 feet long, which was found in 
the Potomac Formation (below the Magothy, in the Lower Creta- 
ceous) and which possessed a woody structure characteristic of 
Sequoia , contained several pieces of amber. Very recently (1967, 
pers. com.) Dr. Jean Langenheim, of the University of California at 
