An extremely rare, 46-million year old fossil of a mosquito with traces of dried blood in its engorged abdomen has now been discovered by a team of scientists in Montana.
Dale Greenwalt, a retired biochemist who volunteers at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, said that the mosquito fossil was one of its kind in the world, News24 reported.
Researchers Resurrect 4-Billion-Year-Old Fossil Protein Structures to Reveal How They Evolved
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Scientists have yet to determine what creature the blood came from since DNA cannot be extracted from a fossil that old.
Greenwalt speculated that the blood might have been from a bird, as the prehistoric mosquito looks similar to a modern one from the genus Culicidae, which likes to feed on birds as well.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: ANI
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: ANI
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Availing the forensic technology researchers have rebuilt faces of some of the most remote members of the human evolutionary 'family' of ancestors dating back to seven million years.
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