News Animals

Ticks had a taste for dinosaur blood

But it’s not clear which species the bloodsuckers preferred

tick on a dino feather preserved in amber

DINE-O-SAUR  In this 99-million-year-old piece of amber, a tick trapped on a dinosaur feather provides rare evidence of the hosts these bloodsuckers preferred during the Cretaceous Period.

E. Peñalver et al/Nature Communications 2017

By Laurel Hamers

- More than 2 years ago

Ticks once tickled dinosaurs’ feathers.

The tiny arthropods have been surreptitiously sucking blood for more than 100 million years, but evidence of early ticks’ preferred hosts has been scant.