TICKS were putting the bite on animals back in the days when dinosaurs roamed
the Earth. A 90-million-year-old fossil tick has been found by palaeontologists
in a block of amber, uncovered on a building site in New Jersey. It is the
oldest tick ever found, pushing back their origin some 50 million years, says
Hans Klompen, an entomologist at Ohio State University.
Although mites, the parent group of ticks, were among the first land animals
400 million years ago, ticks did not evolve until much later. Until the New
Jersey discovery, the oldest known tick had been a 42-million-year-old fossil…
