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Fossil evidence suggests that feathered dinosaurs were infested with ticks:
Feathered dinosaurs were covered in ticks just like modern animals, fossil evidence shows. Parasites similar to modern ticks have been found inside pieces of amber from Myanmar dating back 99 million years. One is entangled with a dinosaur feather, another is swollen with blood, and two were in a dinosaur nest.
Scientists say the discovery, which has echoes of Jurassic Park, is the first direct fossil evidence that ticks fed on the blood of dinosaurs. The research is published in the journal, Nature Communications. "Ticks parasitised feathered dinosaurs; now we have direct evidence of it," co-researcher Dr Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History told BBC News. "This paper represents a very good example of the kind of detailed information that can be extracted from amber fossils."
Prototicks? On my nanoraptors?
Also at Science Magazine, NYT, and NPR.
Parasitised feathered dinosaurs as revealed by Cretaceous amber assemblages (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01550-z) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @05:51PM
Considering the YUGE evolution step of hair foliciles expressing just a single strand of hair, then consider, not the the ability of feathers, but rather the complex hair folicule that ex-volopes from a single strand, dead, into a complex feather. Wow!
Now consider ... for a moment, the normally dead hair folicole ... retained life. A feather with a hearth .. and life, so to speak.
Evolutionized into a feather, tiny, with, legs and sex and all, a skin cell ready to give you a rash .. so to speak.. lol.
A alien that doesnt need to jump into your mouth, but rather is simple shed, daily, from the skin of the feathered dinosaur to infect "the less able skin" :)