Hard tick grasping a dinosaur feather preserved in 99 million-year-old Burmese amber.
Studied tick pieces and extant hard tick for comparison (tick is 5 mm long).
In a discovery that seems straight out of Jurassic Park, researchers have identified a 99-million-year-old fossilized tick on a dinosaur feather.
In a significant divergence from the Hollywood storyline, the fossils will not be yielding any dinosaur DNA.
Private collectors James Zigras and Scott Anderson purchased the pieces online, as Burmese amber is currently massively sold online by local traders.
First, an immature hard tick grasping a feather, which represents direct evidence of ticks parasitising feathered dinosaurs in the mid-Cretaceous.
: We don’t know much about the feathered dinosaur that the hard tick was parasitizing, from just the morphology of the feather. »