June 28 2025
By: The Juice Editorial Team

If “zombie fungus” sounds like something straight out of a horror show, that’s because it is: the paranormal, shambling threats of HBO’s “The Last of Us” are based on a real-life fungus that infects insects, taking control of their bodies and puppeting them like zombies. It turns out, scientists have discovered, those kinds of fungi have been at work a lot longer than we thought.

In today’s world, fungi of the genus Ophiocordyceps infect insect hosts, usually ants, and lodge in their brains. As the ants die, the fungus sends signals to their limbs, urging them to climb as high as they can onto a leaf or blade of grass. At that vantage point, the fungus kills the ants, then erupts from their heads to fire its spores into the air.

Existing fossil records suggested that such parasitic fungi have been using bugs to breed for up to 40 million years. However, a discovery of two insects — a fly and an ant — encased in Cretaceous amber has forced paleontologists to rethink the fungaltimeline.

“The discovery of these two fossils suggests that terrestrial ecosystems were already very complex,” paleobiologist Yuhui Zhuang told CNN, “and that Ophiocordyceps, in particular, may have begun to act as ‘predators’ of insects in the Cretaceous period …” 

Both insects, which were trapped in the amber 99 million years ago, show signs of cordyceps infection. That’s a rarity in and of itself. Fungi are usually too soft to fossilize, so any sample from that long ago is a paleontological treasure. 

“Overall, these two fossils are very rare,” Zhuang noted, “at least among the tens of thousands of amber specimens we’ve seen, and only a few have preserved the symbiotic relationship between fungi and insects.”