Ticks, the notorious disease-spreading parasites, have been making life miserable far longer than human beings have walked the Earth. Even dinosaurs felt their blood-sucking wrath.
Scientists on Tuesday described a number of ticks, including a previously unknown species that they named after the fictional vampire Dracula, entombed in chunks of amber from Myanmar dating back 99 million years, including one still grasping a feather apparently from a Cretaceous Period dinosaur.
One of the ticks belonging to the species Deinocroton draculi, meaning "Dracula's terrible tick," was found so engorged with blood that it increased its size eight-fold. If that sounds familiar, it is the premise of the Jurassic Park books and movies in which DNA extracted from the guts of dinosaur-biting mosquitoes trapped in amber was used to recreate dinosaurs.