A 20-million-year-old flea, preserved in amber, is potentially holding an ancestral strain of the Black Death, one of the world’s deadliest pandemics in human history. The infamous plague claimed the lives of 75-200 million people before peaking in Europe during the mid-14th century.
ANCIENT FLEA LINKED TO THE BLACK DEATH
According to researchers in a new study, now published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, the bacteria is believed to be an ancient strain of Yersinia pestis, a bacillus that was once carried by fleas on rats. The bacteria were discovered on the proboscis of the flea, as well as inside its rectum.
“Aside from physical characteristics of the fossil bacteria that are similar to plague bacteria, their location in the rectum of the flea is known to occur in modern plague bacteria,” stated George Poinar, Jr., the study author and an entomology researcher. Moreover, “the presence of the bacteria on the proboscis is “consistent with the method of transmission of plague bacteria by modern fleas.”
The amber was found in amber mines in the Dominican Republic, between Puerto Plata and Santiago – once the site of a tropical forest. Although scientists are not 100 percent certain of the relationship between the bacteria and Yersinia pestis, a close examination of the find suggests that they are indeed related. The bacteria on the flea has features that match the modern forms of the bubonic plague bacteria, which can be characterized by their unique shape.
The discovery is causing scientists to rethink the evolutionary history of fleas, which are thought to have become disease vectors around 20,000 years ago. Today, there is evidence that suggests that past outbreaks of the Black Death were actually caused by different strains.
Fossilized flea-like creatures have also been discovered dating back to the Dino Era, which could mean the plague might have been an ancient disease that was “infecting and possibly causing some extinction of animals long before any humans existed.” Who knows…maybe comets are not to blame for the demise of the dinosaurs after all. “Plague may have played a larger role in the past than we imagined,” stated Poinar.
