| Title | Bedbugs Evolved More than 100 Million Years ago - and Walked the Earth with T. Rex | |
| Date | Monday May 20 2019, @03:41PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the sweet-dreams-or-sweaty-dreams dept. | ||
Bedbugs Evolved More than 100 Million Years ago - and Walked the Earth with T. Rex:
Bedbugs – some of the most unwanted human bed-mates - have been parasitic companions with other species aside from humans for more than 100 million years, walking the earth at the same time as dinosaurs.
Work by an international team of scientists, including the University of Sheffield, compared the DNA of dozens of bedbug species in order to understand the evolutionary relationships within the group as well as their relationship with humans.
The team discovered that bedbugs are older than bats – a mammal that people had previously believed to be their first host 50-60 million years ago. Bedbugs in fact evolved around 50 million years earlier.
[...] Experts have now discovered that the evolutionary history of bed bugs is far more complex than previously thought and the critters were actually in existence during the time of dinosaurs. More research is needed to find out what their host was at that time, although current understanding suggests it's unlikely they fed on the blood of dinosaurs. This is because bed bugs and all their relatives feed on animals that have a "home" - such as a bird's nest, an owl's burrow, a bat's roost or a human's bed – a mode of life that dinosaurs don't seem to have adopted.
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printed from SoylentNews, Bedbugs Evolved More than 100 Million Years ago - and Walked the Earth with T. Rex on 2024-04-18 22:11:41