Researchers found a 99-million-year-old dinosaur feather along with several ticks, the oldest found so far, trapped in amber. One tick is still attached to the feather, and full from its last blood meal. However, extracting DNA from amber has never been successful, and DNA has a short lifespan, so there won’t be any way to examine the dino DNA. However, this new find tells researchers a lot about the history and evolution of blood-sucking ticks. There were five total ticks stuck in the amber. One was immature, one was the engorged-with-blood tick, and two were covered with beetle hair. This suggests that the ticks were infesting a dinosaur nest, perhaps theropod dinos, which are the ancestors of modern birds. This tells researchers that the dinosaurs raised their young in nests, and also that the dinosaurs fo the Cretaceous age had to deal with parasites like we do.
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