-
-
- Flea with plague bacteria
-
One of the strangest fossils is about 20 million years old. One of the world’s leading researchers of amber, the American palaeontologist George Poinar Jr. and his colleagues from the University of Oregon, discovered it in amber from the Dominican Republic. Dominican amber is one of the most important types of amber, often almost transparent and obtained from the resin of the extinct tree Hymenaea protera. Most of the Dominican amber contains the remains of the neo tropical forests that existed in this region from 25 to 20 million years ago. Numerous insects have already been found in this amber, so it was not a big surprise to find a flea in it. But the discovery of the deadly plague bacteria in the body of this creature surprised researchers. Poinar argued that this microbe is possibly the ancestor of the modern plague bacillus, or Yersinia pestis. He went on to state that several strains of the disease have evolved and died out over time, and as interesting as the new find is, its true meaning remains a mystery at the time. However, he mentioned that the bacterium was present in a dried drop of blood in the flea’s proboscis. This suggests that the way the plague was transmitted was the same as during the worst pandemics in world history. The age of the find dates it to the early Miocene, when the diversity of mammals began to grow rapidly. The Dominican Republic may have been covered in dense rainforest at the time, and this plague flea was unlucky enough to get stuck in fresh resin
READ MORE