Dany Azar/Handout via REUTERS Acquire Licensing RightsWASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are killed annually by malaria and other diseases spread through the bite of mosquitoes, insects that date back to the age of dinosaurs. To their surprise, the male mosquitoes possessed elongated piercing-sucking mouthparts seen now only in females. Some flying insects - tsetse flies, for instance - have hematophagous males. "In all hematophagous insects, we believe that hematophagy was a shift from plant liquid sucking to bloodsucking," Azar said. The researchers said while these are the oldest fossils, mosquitoes probably originated millions of years earlier.

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Persons: Dany Azar, Handout, " Azar, Azar, André Nel, hematophagy, Nel, Will Dunham, Rosalba O'Brien Organizations: REUTERS Acquire, Rights, Chinese Academy of Sciences ' Nanjing Institute of Geology, Lebanese University, National Museum of, World Health Organization, Thomson Locations: Lebanon, Hammana, Paris