Discovery of a tick gorged on the blood of a dinosaur

AFP

AFP

Wednesday, 13 December 2017 10:35

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Wednesday, 13 December 2017 10:39

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PARIS | The ticks feasted on blood from dinosaurs long before he became the nightmare of the walkers and everything that has fur and feathers, and sometimes even bringing scales, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

A team of Spanish researchers and uk has found in Burma four ticks preserved in amber (resulting from the secretions of plants fossilized), old 99 million years ago.

Among these four parasites from the past, the one, of the family of ” ticks dreadful Dracula “, was ” full of blood “, another had a leg “entangled” in a feather, belonging inevitably to a dinosaur, since birds did not yet exist.

This last representative of an extinct species, measured to a millimeter, and had eight legs, but no eyes.

“It is extremely uncommon to discover fossil of parasites sucking directly related to the remains of their hosts,” explains Xavier Delclòs from the university of Barcelona, co-author of the study.

Of a few micrometers to two millimeters long, the mite attaches itself to the skin of its prey to feed on his blood, spreading a variety of diseases.

“While birds are the only descendants of theropod dinosaurs to have survived the mass extinction of the late Cretaceous there are 66 million years ago, the ticks are not just clinging to the life they developed,” say the researchers.

The discovery may think of the movie Jurassic Park in which scientists find dinosaur DNA in a mosquito fossilized in amber. But this will not be again for this time : “all attempts to extract DNA samples of amber turned out to be unsuccessful,” says in a press release the museum of natural history in the University of Oxford.