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.
Image is from the scientific paper about the discovery.
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.
Talking about dinosaur, I don't know if you've seen but they found the fossil from the oldest plésiosaure in the world. I've seen a lot of information in the french and german press but nothing in english. Here are some articles : http://www.rtl.fr/actu/environnement/decouverte-du-plus-vieux-dinosaure-marin-du-monde-plesiosaure-allemagne-squelette-7791443433 and http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/5363.htm
Thanks for letting me know about this one, @wanyz! I had not really seen anything about this yet, but I found a BBC article about it. I'll try to find the original source later when I have some more time, and maybe I'll do a post about it ;)
Original source is "A Triassic plesiosaurian skeleton and bone histology inform on evolution of a unique body plan, Tanja Wintrich, Shoji Hayashi, Alexandra Houssaye, Yasuhisa Nakajima, P. Martin Sander, Science Advances, 13 décembre 2017. DOI : 10.1126/sciadv.1701144" But I don't think you could find it on the net :/
Thanks! Here is the paper if you want to take a look at it.
Darwin said that "it is neither the strongest nor the most intelligent species which survive; it is those which know how to adapt to change". That"s why inescts like ticks are still there and not dinosaur ;)
That's a good saying, but you have to remember that dinosaurs adapted as well :) We still have many living members of the order Crocodilia, as well as all birds which are direct descendants from the feathered dinosaurs.
I love seeing insects in amber . very cool!
Shame DNA has a relatively short half-life..
Yeah, just imagine all the things we could have learned if we could look at the genetic material of the organisms that were stuck in amber!
Thanks for the comment, @xyz666!
Wow this is very informative, i tried to figure out the whole story , i think dinosaurs can be dangerous to us if they created one i was intrigue that no one wont create dino feathers lol
Hehe, yeah, they absolutely can, so maybe it's a good thing :)
"This means that no one will be using this tick to recreate the feathered dinosaur it fed on during its last moments alive;" LOL , what a shame.
Haha, yeah, it would be very interesting to see how the feathered dinosaur actually looked like, but sadly we won't.
@originalworks
The @OriginalWorks BETA V2 bot has upvoted(0.5%) and checked this post!
Some similarity seems to be present here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38224564
This is an early BETA version. If you cited this source, then ignore this message! Reply if you feel this is an error.
I feel like this is an error. The article you link to is about another discovery, and has very little to do with the research I wrote about.
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@valth
unknown news.thanks bro.keep it up
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it :)