Quote
Tiny fossils preserved in Cretaceous resin include one parasite that was engorged when it died.
Blood-filled parasites trapped in amber have been igniting imaginations since the 1990s, when the resurrected dinosaurs of Jurassic Park burst out of Michael Crichton's novels and onto the big screen. Now, scientists say they have found the real deal: chunks of Burmese amber carrying ticks that drank the blood of feathered dinosaurs some 99 million years ago.
One of these parasites is tangled up in a possible dinosaur feather found encased in a lump of amber. Another was found in a separate piece of amber from the same region and had swollen to eight times its original size, suggesting that it had been engorged with blood when it died.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/tick-dinosaur-feather-found-in-amber-blood-parastites-science/
The tick has been named
Deinocroton draculi - "Dracula's terrible tick."
Been a whole lot of ticks in the clock of life since then...
It's a pity that DNA molecules are not likely to survive in it, my dream of visiting a park full of dinosaurs has been squashed. :sad sigh:
Maybe we'll find some other way to get DNA. Maybe some of them are frozen. I mean, life finds a way.
(https://i.giphy.com/media/A3L5BeHxAXLWM/giphy.gif)