Lice today are the bane of furry and feathery animals, nibbling on pelts and plumage and causing a general nuisance. It seems that feathered dinosaurs may have had a similar problem.
In two recently discovered pieces of amber, a total of 10 lice lie next to dinosaur feathers riddled with bite marks from the parasite, according to a new paper published in Nature Communications. The researchers named the newly discovered species Mesophthirus engeli.
The bits of honey-hued fossilized tree sap were collected in Myanmar, dated to between 145 million to 65 million years old, and are the first evidence that feathered dinosaurs dealt with licelike parasites, says study co-author Chungkun Shih, a researcher with the Smithsonian Institutions's National Museum of Natural History. “Even if it is just feather chewing, no hosts like to have parasites,” he says.
Artist‘s reconstruction of the elder development stage of Mesophthirus engeli feeding on dinosaur ...
