bogleech:Another neat thing about ticks: they normally come in two groups, the hard ticks and the so
bogleech:Another neat thing about ticks: they normally come in two groups, the hard ticks and the soft ticks, but there’s a single species of tick with the characteristics of both.It’s called Nuttalliella, named after tick disease specialist George Nuttall, and gene sequencing confirms that it represents a common ancestor between the other kinds of tick. Not only that, but while almost all other ticks are host-specific, Nuttalliella seems able to feed on blood from many, many species including birds, mammals and reptiles.Its genus also seems to be over 200 million years old. These ticks were around for Dimetrodon and the “mammal-like reptiles,” and they outlived their primary hosts, adapting to new groups of animals over millions and millions of years through countless extinctions.Today, though, they live only in deep, rocky deserts of South Africa, and only 50 specimens have ever been collected. A few of those were actually found long dead on museum specimens of meerkats, while 20 some live ticks were found under some rocks in 2011. -- source link