Ticks drank dinosaur blood before they drank ours, amber fossils show

When Paul Nascimbene first spotted the tick preserved in a chunk of 99-million-year-old Burmese amber, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The prehistoric, blood-sucking parasite was tangled up in a dinosaur’s feather, and it shows for the first time that ticks pestered dinosaurs just like they pester birds, dogs, and deer today, according to new research. “It's like a minute in a day, 99 million years ago,” says Nascimbene, who runs the American Museum of Natural History’s Fossil Insect Lab.

The discovery, detailed today in the journal Nature Communications, is only part of the story: the paper describes a total of five prehistoric ticks trapped inside four pieces of amber. While the tick tangled with the feather belongs to a known...

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