"Amber is fossilized resin, so it's able to capture small bits of the ecosystem almost instantly," says Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a research fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and an author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. "Amber can actually preserve interactions between organisms. This is the case with the feather and the grasping tick."The tick-and-feather pair support a theory that Pérez-de la Fuente had already spent years developing, based on other ticks trapped in amber from the same period. Those ticks didn't have dinosaur feathers encased with them, but there were little hairs. The hairs resemble those left behind by a type of beetle larva that, today, lives in bird nests.