We already knew that ticks (Family Ixodidae) have been around for a very long time, but it was just recently that scientists have found solid evidence that they were actually feeding on dinosaur blood.
The evidence was found in a 99 million year old piece of Burmese amber, and features a tick that is grasping a feather. This might not seem very interesting, but the feather does actually belong to a feathered dinosaur, not a bird, which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting!
This is the first time there have been evidence that feathered dinosaurs were living at the same time as the ticks, and in addition to this it confirms a direct link between them since the tick is grasping the feather. Many scientists have suspected this to be the case for a long time, but getting solid evidence like this is much better than a theory that has yet to be backed by solid evidence.
So what does this tell us? Not a lot more than the fact that ticks were feeding on dinosaurs. It might not seem that super important for our day to day lives, but “small” scientific discoveries like this one add one more piece to the puzzle that might eventually lead us to understand how the lives of the dinosaurs were.
Ticks are vectors for disease
The family Ixodidae consists of over 700 species, and many of these ticks are vectors for transmitting disease to humans. Some are specialized to only feed on blood for certain species, while others feed on whatever type of blood they can get access to, including humans.
The exact species that was found in the amber is now long-gone, but since we know so much of the closely related species, it is safe to assume certain things about it. We can’t really know if it transmitted any kind of disease to the dinosaurs, but maybe we will find out in a future study. I would be really interested to learn more about what diseases dinosaurs had to be careful of, and how often they were generally affected, but that’s a post for another time.
Jurassic Park had the same thing happen - sort of
If you remember the movie Jurassic Park, then you might remember the mosquito that were preserved inside amber. This mosquito allegedly contained dinosaur blood, which was used to recreate the dinosaurs in the park, but this entire sequence is not really possible in real life. The reason is that amber takes very good care of the looks of what it preserves, but the genetic material is not preserved well at all, making it impossible to run good genetic tests or copies from the material.
This means that no one will be using this tick to recreate the feathered dinosaur it fed on during its last moments alive; not now, and not ever. We’re still a long way from being able to recreate a living dinosaur, and our best attempt at bringing back an extinct animal from genetic material only lasted between 3 and 7 minutes, so we still have a long way to go.
Thanks for reading
Thanks for reading my post about the 99 million year old amber that contained evidence of ticks that fed on dinosaurs. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to learn more, then check out the paper that published the findings. It is available for free, so make sure to check it out if you got some minutes to spare.