Re: Dino-Tick/Mother of all Ticks

["Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>]

Brent,
    There are certainly taxa of mites that feast on feathers, and there is 
no doubt in my mind that feathered non-avian dinosaurs were the hosts to 
such mites.
     However, the subgroup of mites which we call ticks (Ixodida) feed on 
blood, so the closest they would come to the feathers themselves might be 
the feather follicles in the skin of birds (and their feathered non-avian 
relatives).  I suspect that all dinosaur groups suffered from ticks in the 
Cretaceous.
     I am no tick expert, but they usually drop off the host once they have 
a full meal of blood.  Therefore, the idea suggested in this report (that a 
seafaring bird picked up a tick in South America and flew to New Jersey) 
seems very improbable at best.  Seems far more likely this particular kind 
of tick lived on birds in New Jersey at the time.
    As I noted in my other posting last night, ticks were probably around 
long before the Upper Cretaceous (how much earlier is certainly debatable), 
and they probably had a nearly worldwide distribution by that time (although 
tick origins probably were in Gondwanaland).  There were probably lots of 
ticks in North America by that time, and there doesn't seem to be any good 
reason to assume this tick fed on any particular kind of bird, much less 
that a migratory bird carried it from South America to New Jersey.  This 
tick is a rare find, but to suggest (as this report does) that ticks were 
rare in North America in the Upper Cretaceous doesn't make any sense to me.
                 Cheers, Ken
********************************************************
> From: "Brent Jones" <bjones@mail.cosi.org>
> Reply-To: bjones@mail.cosi.org
> To: <4mjmu@home.com>, <dinosaur@usc.edu>
> Subject: Re: Dino-Tick/Mother of all Ticks
> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 08:37:26 -0500
>
> >>> M Murphy <4mjmu@home.com> 03/29/01 07:59PM sent the following URL:
>
> http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2001/03/28/tick010328
>
> Reading the attached story, it seems these ticks were specialized feeders - 
> they attached themselves to featers. Therefore, the writer continues, it is 
> thought that they fed on "sea-faring birds". What is to stop them from 
> attaching themselves to some of the feathered non-avian dinosaurs thought 
> to have been running around at the time?
>
> Brent : )
>
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