In the novel and film Jurassic Park , the blood of a prehistoric mosquito preserved in a piece of amber served to resurrect the line of dinosaurs, something highly unlikely to be put into practice in real life, as scientists have tired of explaining . Anyway, fantasies aside, the new paleontological finding echoed by the journal Nature Communications is still sensational: the first proof that ticks probably preyed on giant reptiles extinct 99 million years ago , in full Cretaceous, as they do today with birds, dogs and other mammals.
The first author of the article is Enrique Peñalver, researcher at the Geomining Museum of the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME) , and other Spanish experts have participated in the study: Ricardo Pérez de la Fuente (University of Oxford) –co-director of the work–, Antonio Arillo (Complutense University), Xavier Delclòs (UB-IRBio) and David Peris (Jaume I University).
These are four pieces of amber – fossil resin – from northern Myanmar where five parasites were trapped . One of them belongs to a well-known prehistoric species ( Cornupalpatum burmanicum ) and is attached to a feather from a theropod dinosaur, the ancestor of modern birds . It seems that the arachnid, ancestor of the tick that today transmits Lyme disease, was stalking its prey in the feather and had not had time to sink its jaws when the drop of resin reached it.
Dracula’s ticks
The other four had certain anatomical characteristics in the part of the mouth and wrinkles in the anus not observed until now, so the researchers assigned them to a new species of extinct parasites : Deinocroton draculi or “terrible ticks of Dracula”, from the family Deinocrotonidae . As Enrique Peñalver has explained, one of them voluntarily released from the host after drawing its blood and was completely swollen, with a size that was eight times that of the normal state . This way of feeding connects it with the current “soft ticks”, that is, those that do not have a kind of shield such as the one called “hard ticks” present.
Although there are no concrete traces of dinosaurs in the four specimens of Deinocrotonidae , researchers have observed peculiar villi attached to their bodies that are only found in the larvae of beetles called dermestids, habitual inhabitants of animal nests, and, in the Cretaceous, large lizards. The discovery of the theropod feather – then there were no birds yet – reinforces this hypothesis and suggests that 99 million years ago several species of ticks were already sucking the blood of dinosaurs.
But did those bugs transmit diseases to them, as do current parasites ? With the data collected by the specialists, it is impossible to determine it; The ideal would be to perform a DNA analysis, but, as has been repeatedly verified, amber does not preserve the genetic material in good condition.
Photo: Cornupalpatum burmanicum specimen in a theropod pen. Credit: Ricardo Pérez de la Fuente.
Source: Nature Communications 8, Article number: 1924 (2017)
doi: 10.1038 / s41467-017-01550-z
