TICK FOUND PRESERVED IN AMBER ABOUT 99 MILLION OLD ON A DINOSAUR’S FOSSILIZED FEATHER

Hard tick grasping a dinosaur feather preserved in 99 million-year-old Burmese amber. Credit: Peñalver et al.

In a discovery that seems straight out of Jurassic Park, researchers have identified a 99-million-year-antiquated fossilized tick on a dinosaur feather. In a significant divergence from the Hollywood storyline, the fossils will not be affable any dinosaur DNA. The ticks last meal was not preserved, and though it had been, the lifespan of DNA is too rapid for it to be successfully extracted. However, because they were trapped together, the fossils apportion the first speak to evidence of ticks feeding a propos dinosaur blood. The psychotherapy with examined adding ticks trapped in amber, including a forward unknown species that is thought to have furthermore fed going on for feathered dinosaurs. Ricardo Prez-de la Fuente, a research fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and one of the psychiatrys authors, tells us more.

ResearchGate: Where did these fossils come from, and how did you come to investigate them?

Ricardo Prez-de la Fuente: Amber pieces in this scrutiny are from Burmese amber, and are approximately 99 million years antiquated. Private collectors James Zigras and Scott Anderson purchased the pieces online, as Burmese amber is currently massively sold online by local traders. They both over and ended surrounded by occurring donating their material to museums and got in be contiguously when researchers specialized in the probe of amber. Breaking the wall that exists together amid collectors and scientists is key for the advancement of specimen-based research, particularly in palaeontology, as our research shows.

RG: Whats significant approximately this locate?

Prez-de la Fuente: Our findings represent the first adopt evidence of a parasite-host membership together amid ticks and feathered dinosaurs. Fossil ticks had been back found, along with in Burmese amber, but never in association as soon as remains of their hosts, as a result identifying the hosts remained conjecture. We describe a relationship, extinct bureau of ticks based going around for multiple specimens. Some of these latter ticks can then be united to feathered hosts, although indirectly, through the presence of specialized beetle hairs preserved attached to their bodies.

Reconstruction of the habitus of Deinocroton draculi on an immature feathered dinosaur. The reconstruction shows two unengorged males (left) and a female feeding to engorgement (right). Male body length ca. 3.9 mm. Colours of the ticks are conjectural but based on the colouration seen in the related nuttalliellid ticks. Performed by the authors using models of the males created by the artist Oscar Sanisidro.

RG: What can you tell us about the ticks? How do they compare to ticks today?

Pérez-de la Fuente: There are two pieces of evidence in the paper that are important to differentiate. First, an immature hard tick grasping a feather, which represents direct evidence of ticks parasitising feathered dinosaurs in the mid-Cretaceous. That tick belongs to an already described fossil species from Burmese amber, Cornupalpatum burmanicum, and is very similar to modern hard ticks. The second piece of evidence that we present in the paper are four ticks assigned to the new species Deinocroton draculi. These ticks, classified into a new tick family, Deinocrotonidae, are closer to a single species of tick classified into its own subfamily, and that only lives in Southern Africa.

RG: What about the dinosaur it was feeding on?

Prez-de la Fuente: We dont know much roughly the feathered dinosaur that the highly developed tick was parasitizing, from just the morphology of the feather. It could have been a sports ground-supervision feathered dinosaur or a form closer to militant natural world taking into account powered flight. One matter is for deferential, however: the tick did not have a unfriendly bird as a host, as futuristic natural world appeared more or less 25 million years difficult than the age of the Burmese amber.

Studied tick pieces and extant hard tick for comparison (tick is 5 mm long). Credit: E. Peñalver

RG: Could dinosaur DNA be extracted from this tick, in imitation of in Jurassic Park?

Prez-de la Fuente: Although Jurassic Park was based in the region of a real psychotherapy that had claimed to have extracted DNA from amber, subsequent experiments concluded that the amber sample had been impure by lawless DNA. Currently, the technique to extract sufficiently swiftly-preserved DNA from amberif that is ever practicabledoes not exist, as DNA easily degrades as period goes by.

Katherine Lindemann on ResearchGate.