Dinosaurs were DRAINED of blood by GIGANTIC HORROR FLEAS

"Am I the only person who finds Ferrell not as funny as everyone says he is?" - No, you're not.

But back to the article; is it just me or does that thing look like a 6-legged sparrow with antennae?

Is that an artists impression or a photo? I can't tell

Wow

These things sucked blood like a Street View car sucks Wifi.

I can just hear a couple of surviving dinosaurs having a conversation

<Yorkshire accent>

"When I was a lad, we proper fleas, not these miniature little things that cannot bit through a piece of paper if they wanted to!"

"Right you are! I remember fleas that could bite right through a Triceratops's scales, he could"

"That's nothing, I saw some fleas that could drill straight through an Ankylosaur's club, no less"

"Rubbish, we had fleas which could drill for oil, they could, bite so strong it would go a mile through solid rock, it could!"

"And the problem with kids these days is that when you tell them they don't believe a word you say!"

</Yorkshire accent>

That looks like a picture of a lawyer.

Or a politician. I can't quite tell from this angle.

Ah! that explains why all the office started scratching earlier...

NT.

Oh the irony...

...that the journal that publishes papers on extinct, prehistoric fleas is named "Current Biology"

grain of salt

I've always been told that insects can not be 'very large' because of the fact thaty they don't have longues but a completely different 'breathing system' that requires them to remain small.

So they can't have been 'football' size, but they can be 'ping-pong' ball sized.

I doubt it would have been that painful. Any pain would result in the parasite being brushed off, whereas it would have preferred to remain undetected.

You just need a big proboscis to get through thick hide.

You can find these still

on any part of the west coast of Scotland on a summer evening.

Been done

I vaguely remember a brilliant SF short story from the 1960s (I think) called something like "Poor Little Hunter". A brilliant scientist invents a time machine and (as one would) jumps back to the Cretaceous to shoot a brontosaur (as they called them in the 1960s). He drops a big specimen - about 60 tons - with his first shot, and is just going for a closer look when he sees some creatures racing towards him from the dead dino's direction. Moments later he is hit by half a dozen dog-sized parasites, which chew him up in seconds leaving little but a few bones.

Moral: (1) respect the ecosystem - especially if it's in your own distant past - and (2) it's not always the big animal that is the real threat.

wrong career path

ref. "...a flea shot, if not a flu shot".

should have become a tabloid "reporter". Or a press "officer"

pedantic but hey it's the register

why does the picture show hair? Dinosaurs were hairless.

Now where did I put my coat...

Not wishing to pour scorn on this but if I got speared by a flea it'd be like being bitten by ... err ... a flea. Now, if I was the size of a tyranno-whatsit and I was bitten by something much bigger than a flea it'd surely be, relatively speaking, like being bitten by a large flea?

About time

Let's look for some of these preserved in amber.

so that's where my ex-wife evolved from.

Aren't they called 'politicians" now?

Bankers trace ancestors back to dinosaurs,,,

Evidently bankers killed off the dinosaurs too,,,now they're feeding on us.

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum."

Huge Craters now thought to be Flea Jumping-Off Points

Might be a future headline

Noooo...................

My god, the mother in law is a flea.