Discovery shows ‘Dracula’ ticks fed on blood of feathered dinosaurs
Ticks have been making life miserable far longer than human beings have walked the Earth – dinosaurs were also victims of the blood-suckers.
Scientists have found ticks, including an unknown species that they named after Dracula, entombed in chunks of amber in Myanmar from 99 million years ago, including one still grasping a feather from a Cretaceous period dinosaur.
One of the ticks belonging to the species Deinocroton draculi, or “Dracula’s terrible tick”, was so engorged that it increased its size eight-fold.
If that sounds familiar, it is the premise of the Jurassic Park books and movies in which DNA extracted from the guts of dinosaur-biting mosquitoes trapped in amber was used to recreate dinosaurs.
Do not expect any cloning from these ticks.
“It seems that modern techniques are unable to extract DNA, or at least sufficiently well-preserved DNA, from amber inclusions,” said palaeontologist Ricardo Perez-de la Fuente of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, one of the researchers whose study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
“DNA does not stand the passing of millions of years when entombed in amber,” Dr Perez-de la Fuente said.
Amber, fossilised tree resin, has provided a remarkable window into the past. In this case, it offered the first direct evidence of a parasite-host relationship between ticks and feathered dinosaurs.
The characteristics of the feather being grasped by an immature tick did not allow the researchers to pinpoint a type of dinosaur that was the parasite’s blood meal.
Two of the Dracula ticks provided indirect evidence of these parasites feeding on dinosaurs.
Hair-like structures from the larvae of so-called skin beetles were found attached to the ticks. Modern skin beetles feed in nests, eating feathers, skin and hair from the occupants.