Not just asteroid impact, deadly malaria too killed dinosaurs

New York: Malaria -- often thought to be of more modern origin -- may have killed dinosaurs and the origin of this deadly disease may have begun in an insect such as the biting midge more than 100 million years ago, researchers reveal.A new analysis of the prehistoric origin of malaria suggests that it evolved in insects at least 100 million years ago, and the first vertebrate hosts of this disease were probably reptiles, which at that time would have included the dinosaurs.

Malaria, that still kills more than 400,000 people a year, is often thought to have been originatd 15,000-eight million years old - caused primarily by one genus of protozoa, Plasmodium, and spread by anopheline mosquitoes.“But the ancestral forms of this disease used different insect vectors and different malarial strains, and may literally have helped shape animal survival and evolution on Earth,” said George Poinar, Jr, researcher at Oregon State University. Scientists have argued and disagreed for a long time about how malaria evolved and how old it is.