Amber Fossils Reveal Lice-Like Bugs Crawling in Dinosaur Feathers

Ancient insects exchangeable to mod lice parasitized dinosaurs by feasting on their feathers , as evidenced by a pair of fascinating new amber dodo .

mod birds are sometimes infest by feather - manducate and feather - feeding bird louse , and as newresearchpublished today in Nature Communications evidence , their Mesozoic predecessors had a similar trouble .

The new newspaper , led by palaeontologist Dong Ren from the Capital Normal University in Beijing , China , account a previously unknown dirt ball - like insect , named Mesophthirus engeli , that lived 100 million years ago during the mid - Cretaceous . Ten of these mortal were found in two pieces of Burmese amber — both of which contained discredited feathers . It ’s guilt feelings by tie , but these feathering certainly seem to have been jaw upon by the bugs . It ’s now considered the oldest evidence of feathering - chew in the fossil record .

Mesophthirus engeli crawling on dinosaur feathers, as found preserved in mid-Cretaceous amber.

Mesophthirus engeli crawling on dinosaur feathers, as found preserved in mid-Cretaceous amber.Image: (Taiping Gao)

That dinosaurs were tormented by leech is scarcely a surprisal . Dinosaurs living during the Jurassic ( 201 million to 145 million years ago ) and the Cretaceous ( 145 million to 66 million years ago ) were afflicted byblood - sucking fleas , andticks have parasitized dinossince at least the Cretaceous .

The unexampled find is unlike in that it ’s now the earliest example of a feather - chewing insect , the previous disk belonging toMegamenopon rasnitsyni — an ancient doll louse fossil plant in Germany that date back some 44 million years to the Eocene , approximately 22 million years after non - avian dinosaur go extinct . The new discovery now pushes back this parasitic behavior by another 34 million yr , which is a bragging great deal .

“ It is very rare and difficult to find these earliest louse - alike insects in amber , ” Chungkun Shih , a co - author of the new written report and a scientist from the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution , wrote in an email to Gizmodo . The discovery is substantial , he said , because it ’s help fossilist to well understand the former evolutionary development of these insects ’ strong-arm feature and feather - fertilise behaviors .

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Artist’s reconstruction of Mesophthirus engeli.Image: (Chen Wang)

In entire , 10 specimen of M. rasnitsyni were distinguish in two opus of amber , both of which were found in Myanmar ( formerly Burma ) and carry dinosaur feathers . microscopical analysis of these plumage showed they were partially damaged — the kind of damage you ’d expect from sponger capable of chewing through the tough barbs and barbules of a feather .

As Shih explained , the newly described houri featured a figure of characteristic consistent with a sponger , include a “ flyspeck wingless consistence , ” a head with “ strong manduction mouthparts , ” thick and short antennae with long setae ( pilus - similar structures ) , and “ leg with only one single tarsal chela tie in with two additional long setae , ” among other feature . The bug had “ strong chewing mouthparts to feed on the plume ” and “ leg claws and seta to go up on and cleave to the feather and avoid being removed by the server , ” said Shih .

Interestingly , the mid - Cretaceous just happens to cooccur with the diversification of birds and other feather dinosaur , so the timing makes a spate of sense . These parasite were simply taking full reward of newfangled opportunity — much to the chagrin of Cretaceous dinosaur .

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