In Jurassic Park, they used blood sucked from dinosaurs by mosquitoes and trapped in amber as the source of their dino DNA. Now new evidence suggests they could also have used ticks! Paleontologists have just found a 99-million-year-old tick, entombed in amber, clutching to the feather of a dinosaur.
Amazingly, this is the very first actual evidence that prehistoric ticks actually looked at the giant lizards as a possible food source. What might be even more impressive is that this is actually the very first evidence of a parasite with its host in the fossil record. This particular tick was found on the feather of a nanoraptor, a dino that was no larger than a hummingbird.
So what does this mean for us? Probably nothing, but who knows. Maybe each new discovery like this takes us one step closer to a real Jurassic Park. After all, life finds a way!
