Dino boffins found tick still gripping a dinosaur feather after 100 million years in a piece of fossilised tree resin from Burma. Another tick was bloated with what is believed to be dinosaur blood, swelling its size eight times.
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@ Ancient tick is believed to live on Raptor Blue.
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Dino boffins found tick still gripping a dinosaur feather after 100 million years in a piece of fossilised tree resin from Burma. Another tick was bloated with what is believed to be dinosaur blood, swelling its size eight times.
The fossil record tells us that feathers like the one we have studied were already present on a wide range of theropod dinosaurs, a group which included ground-running forms without flying ability, as well as bird-like dinosaurs capable of powered flight.
The creature, known as Dracula's terrible ticik, is 5mm long and appears to have feasted on the blood of a feathered dinosaur.
So although we can't be sure what kind of dinosaur the tick was feeding on, the mid-Cretaceous age of the Burmese amber confirms that the feather certainly did not belong to a modern bird, as these appeared much later in theropod evolution according to current fossil and molecular evidence.
The scientists behind the new discovery stress that all attempts to remove DNA from such ancient amber specimens have failed due to deterioration of the complex molecule over time.
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