Deinocroton is an extinct genus of tick. It is known from four species found in Burmese amber, dating to the earliest part of the Cenomanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, around 99 million years ago.
Deinocroton is an extinct genus of tick. It is known from four species found in Burmese amber, dating to the earliest part of the Cenomanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, around 99 million years ago.
== Taxonomy == Four species have been named, including the type species D. draculi, D. copia, D. bicornis and D. lacrimus all from Burmese amber, which dates to the late Albian-early Cenomanian stages of the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago. The genus is suggested to be more closely related to Nuttalliella than to the two major living families of ticks, which is supported by the anatomy of its leg joints. While originally placed in its own family Deinocrotonidae, a 2024 study suggested that it should be placed into Nuttalliellidae, along with Nuttalliella and the extinct genus Legionaris also known from Burmese amber.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).