When you think of bats, you tend to think of them as the perpetrators of vampiric activity. Even though most of the furry fliers aren't actually bloodsuckers, they've gotten a bad rap with the whole Dracula association. But we typically don't consider them the victims of bloodthirsty parasites. The bat fly, however, has been hard at work sucking the blood of all kinds of bats for millions of years, according to a newly found amber fossil.

While bat flies are still around today, they haven't been the subject of a whole lot of scientific research. Bats themselves are hard to catch, let alone the parasites that feed off of them. But George Poinar Jr. of Oregon State University, an expert on bug fossils, recently discovered a bat fly that wasn't hard to catch at all--one that has been preserved in amber for 20 million years. 

Poinar came upon the bat fly specimen in a mine in the Dominican Republic. The fossil demonstrates that these bugs co-evolved with bats a long, long time ago. Their front legs are specially shaped to plow quickly all over bats' bodies. The specific genus that Poinar found in amber no longer lives on earth today, but the special bat-specific body modifications are present in both the extinct genus and the hundreds of still-living bat fly species. 

While bat flies typically don't leave their bat hosts very often, they are known to wander from their food sources and homes while searching for a mate. Researchers speculate that this particular amber-coated bug was on the prowl for a lady bat fly when he got stuck in tree resin. His bad luck is now our gain 20 million years later; he may not have found a mate, but now he's a one-of-a-kind window into the past.

What's especially interesting about this bat fly fossil isn't just that the strange little parasites have been around for so long. Poinar found a new species of bat malaria that has never before been seen in the scientific community. Bat malaria is already a rare enough disease--it's only been written about in scientific papers maybe five or six times--and to uncover a previously unknown version of it is pretty cool stuff. Quite a lucky find on Poinar's part; not only did he unearth a rare bug in that mine, but he unearthed a rare disease, too. It's not every day that you get two bugs for the price of one.