As if the dinosaurs didn’t have enough to look out for with volcanic eruptions, fearsome predators stalking the land and a huge, unstoppable asteroid hurtling across space to ruin their day.

Now scientists have found that the prehistoric beasts also had blood-sucking ticks to contend with, having spotted carcasses of the parasites lodged in 99million-year-old lumps of Burmese amber along with material left over from dinosaurs and their nests.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two Deinocroton draculi ticks preserved together, both adult males. Photograph: Nature Communications; Penalver et al

Researchers at Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History teamed up with Spanish experts to examine pieces of ancient amber from Myanmar which contained ticks, bits of beetles that fed on animal tissues, and at least one feather from a dinosaur.



As in the movie Jurassic Park, the organisms were immaculately preserved in the amber, itself a fossilised form of tree resin, though scientists ruled out any hope of extracting their DNA because the molecules are considered too fragile to survive for tens of millions of years.

A half centimetre-long hard tick preserved in amber was found clinging to a dinosaur feather, while others were found with the remains of beetles that are thought to have infested the nests where dinosaurs laid their eggs. Among the grim haul of parasites was a new, but now extinct, species, named Deinocroton draculi or “Dracula’s terrible tick” by the British and Spanish team, after one was found to be bloated with blood.

The material is the most compelling evidence to date that ticks sucked the blood of feathered dinosaurs, some of which evolved into modern day birds.



Fossilised remains of two-legged dinosaurs called theropods show that many were covered with rich feather plumages, for warmth and display. The latest research suggests that ticks found a home in the dinosaur feathers, and feasted on the animals’ blood, at least as far back as the Cretaceous period, 100 million years ago.

“Although we can’t be sure what type of dinosaur the tick was feeding on, the mid-Cretaceous age of the Burmese amber confirms that the feather certainly did not belong to a modern bird, as these appeared much later,” said Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente who worked on the specimens. Details of the work are published in the journal Nature Communications.



The tick entangled in the dinosaur feather is the first direct evidence scientists have that the parasites fed on the blood of the prehistoric creatures. The other ticks provide more circumstantial evidence. Some were found with bits of beetle known to live in nests, making it likely that the ticks did too. But it is impossible to know if all of the ticks were dinosaur parasites, because the blood inside the ticks cannot be analysed to identify their last blood meal.



Taken together, the finding shows that while the birds are the only descendants of feathered dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction 66 million years ago, the ticks clung on and thrive to this day, still feeding on the blood of modern birds.

