99-million-year-old ticks sucked the blood of dinosaurs

Ticks may be a disease-carrying menace for hikers and pets, but they’re also masters of survival: The parasites were sucking the blood of dinosaurs 99 million years ago, according to a set of amber fossils from Myanmar. One of the samples, in which a tick is hanging onto a dino feather, provides the oldest direct evidence of what these ancient parasites ate.

The find is a “paleontologist’s dream,” says Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in the United Kingdom who helped lead the work.

The amber samples—hardened tree resin that can preserve animals trapped within in exquisite detail—held several clues showing that ticks fed on dinosaurs. The most direct evidence comes from the tick grasping a feather that belonged to a theropod dinosaur, a member of the group that ultimately gave rise to modern birds. Another includes two ticks together, both of which have hairs stuck to them from a type of beetle larvae thought to live in dinosaur nests.

Read more: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/99-million-year-old-ticks-sucked-blood-dinosaurs