Until now, it was thought that malaria, a disease that affects more than 200 million people in the world and claims more than 400,000 lives a year, had been ravaging our planet for a relatively short time, between 15,000 and at most eight million years. But according to a new study published in the journal American Entomologist , it seems that the disease produced by parasites of the genus Plasmodium could have inaugurated its criminal history no less than 100 million years ago , and that its first victims were reptiles, without excluding the dinosaurs
So says George Poinar, paleobiologist at Oregon State University, who had already suggested that malaria played an important role in the extinction of the dinosaurs. Poinar believes that the modern version of malaria, transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes, arose 20 million years ago , but that long before it was inoculated into animals through primitive bedbugs.
According to this expert, malaria has begun to develop in the protozoan parasites of the Gregarinida group, which today infect malaria-spreading insects. To put together his theory, the American scientist has painstakingly studied prehistoric insects trapped in amber. In fact, in one of these fossils he discovered the oldest trace of the Plasmodium parasite, between 15 and 20 million years old. Poinar argues that malaria evolved along with insects.
And these, together with the microbial pathogens and the diseases they cause, made an appearance in the final epoch of the dinosaurs, so they could decisively contribute to their disappearance, regardless of whether a catastrophic event also occurred , such as the impact of a meteorite or the eruption of a supervolcano.
