The 100-million-year itch: ticks fed on dinosaur blood
UNITED STATES: Scientists have made a skin-crawling discovery: ancient ticks, trapped in amber, that fed on the blood of feathered dinosaurs nearly 100 million years ago.
The specimens, described in the journal Nature Communications, include the oldest dinosaur parasite to be found together with remains from its extinct host - and offer a smoking gun in the long, intimate history between ticks and dinosaurs and their living descendants, birds.
‘‘I was astonished,’’ study coauthor Ricardo Perez-de la Fuente, a paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, said of the discovery. ‘‘It was something we weren’t expecting at all.’’
Scientists have suspected that the blood-sucking bugs dined on dinosaurs for millions of years. Their big break came in the form of ancient Burmese amber specimens that had been bought online by private collectors, who donated the finds to museums. One of the 99-million-year-old hard tick known as Cornupalpatum burmanicum, was found entangled in a plume from a feathered dinosaur - a telling sign that the tick had latched on to the feather before it was trapped in golden tree sap.
The scientists had to work harder to establish the link between the other specimens, identified as Deinocroton draculi, and feathered dinosaurs.
Attached to these ticks’ bodies were setae - tiny hairlike bristles from specialised beetle larvae that live in nests and eat tough-todigest organic material such as skin or hair. Many feathered dinosaurs are thought to have built nests.
The find doesn’t mean there will be a real-life Jurassic Park any time soon, however.
The book and film featured dinosaurs brought to life thanks to blood-engorged mosquitoes trapped in amber, but in reality, DNA has a very short half-life, and such genetic information would not be recoverable.