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Lice Probably Bugged Dinos
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06-04-2011 4:32pm#1It has long been suspected that dinosaurs would have had all sorts of parasites. Now a mapping of the evolutionary tree containing lice shows that lice very similar to the variety that plague modern birds were around during the time of teh dinosaurs.n international team, including scientists at the Natural History Museum, carried out a genetic and fossil study and produced a family tree showing the evolutionary history of lice. By putting a time-scale on this family tree, their data suggests that dinosaurs probably had lice.
Parasitic lice are dependent on their hosts such as birds and mammals for their survival. This dependency is so strong that their evolutionary histories are closely tied together. Many lice have evolved body shapes that allow them to live on specific parts of the host body. For example, wing lice are often adapted to the space between the barbs of wing feathers. The different sizes of this gap in different bird species makes it hard for the lice to ever change hosts.
The team showed that parasitic lice evolved about 130 million years ago and that they were already diversifying before the event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other animals 65 million years ago.
Read more here.
Left: Prehistoric louse (Megamenopon rasnitsyni) Right: modern fowl lice (Holomenopon brevithoracicum)1
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