Giant fleas plagued feathered dinosaurs

It's amazing what you find when you scratch about in old rocks ? the oldest and largest flea ever discovered, for instance, which has turned up in Jurassic rocks in China. Warm-blooded animals have been itching to get rid of the pests ever since.

At 20.6 millimetres long, the 165-million-year old fossils dwarf the largest living flea ? a 12 mm species which plagues the mountain beaver of North America. The fossil beasts are so large they may have lived on feathered dinosaurs rather than the small mammals that scuttled across the Mesozoic landscape, according to Andr? Nel at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, a member of the team that made the find (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10839).

"Small hosts ? mice, shrews, small bats ? never have any large [external] parasites, and certainly never anything the size of these wonderful, extinct fleas," says David Grimaldi at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, who was not involved in the find.

Mammals probably did not escape the blood suckers for long. The most primitive fleas alive today all live on mammals, which suggests their ancestors quickly hopped from feathered dinosaurs to our furry forerunners.

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