Dinosaurs, the most fearsome creatures ever to walk the Earth, were bugged already 100 million years ago by a paltry pest that still plagues animals today: the bloodsucking tick, scientists have discovered. Preserved for eternity in amber, fossilised tree resin, researchers have found a hard tick -- uncannily similar to those we know -- clinging to a 99-million-year-old dinosaur feather, a team wrote in the journal Nature Communications this week. `The discovery is remarkable because fossils of parasitic, blood-feeding creatures directly associated with remains of their host are exceedingly scarce, and the new specimen is the oldest known to date,` they said in a statement. The well-preserved, juvenile insect was less than a millimetre in size, had eight legs, but no eyes. One of its legs was entangled in the barb of a `pennaceous` feather -- those with a central quill as sported by some dinosaurs and their modern offspring: birds. The team could not identify which type of dinosaur the
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