Eleonora's falcon (Falco eleonorae Géné, 1839) is a well-known long-distance migrant of the Afro-Palaearctic flyway, a summer breeder of the Mediterranean region and North-west Africa and a winter resident of Madagascar and surrounding areas, thus characterized as a double endemic. Within the context of a long-term monitoring and conservation programme on Antikythira Island, Greece, which accommodates one of the largest concentrations of breeding pairs of Eleonora's falcons globally, birds were subjected to regular inspections for the presence of ticks from 2017 to 2023. In total, 104 adults and 149 nymphs (all belonging to Haemaphysalis genus) were collected. All ticks, apart from 2 nymphs, exhibited broadly salient palpi and did not possess the pronounced palpal segment 2 spurs or spur-like angles that are characteristic of adults, nymphs and most larvae of Rhipistoma, thus placed them in the Ornithophysalis subgenus. Following comprehensive morphological assessment and genetic analysis of the mitochondrial genome by means of next-generation sequencing of both adult and nymphal stages of the ticks, our empirical findings substantiate the delineation of a previously unclassified species. This taxonomic assignment situates the newly described species within the Ornithophysalis subgenus and the Haemaphysalis doenitzi group, marking its presence for the first time within the Western Palaearctic region.

The first fossil potentially assignable to the extant hard tick genus Haemaphysalis CL Koch (1844) (Ixodida: Ixodidae) is described from the Late Cretaceous (ca. 99 Ma) Burmese amber of Myanmar. Haemaphysalis (Alloceraea) cretacea sp. nov. is the oldest and only fossil representative of this genus; living members of which predominantly feed on mammals. Their typical hosts are known since at least the Jurassic and the discovery of a mid-Cretaceous parasite, which might have fed on mammals raises again the question of to what extent ticks are coupled to their (modern) host groups. An inferred Triassic split of Argasidae (soft ticks) into the bird-preferring Argasinae and mammal-preferring Ornithodorinae dates to about the time when dinosaurs (later including birds) and mammaliaforms as potential hosts were emerging. Ixodidae may have split into Prostriata and Metastriata shortly after the end-Permian mass extinction, an event which fundamentally altered the terrestrial vertebrate fauna. Prostriata (the genus Ixodes) prefer birds and mammals today, and some may have used groups like cynodonts in the Triassic. Basal metastriate ticks (e.g. Amblyomma) prefer reptiles, but derived metastriates (including Haemaphysalis) again prefer mammals. Here, we may be looking at a younger (Cretaceous?) shift associated with more recent mammalian radiations.