FfFfFfFF 58,120 Posted March 11, 2020 Share Posted March 11, 2020 A spectacular new amber fossil from Myanmar holds the skull of the smallest prehistoric dinosaur ever found: a bird-like creature that lived 99 million years ago and grew no bigger than the smallest birds alive today. The fossil, described today in the journal Nature, measures just 1.5 centimeters long from the back of the head to the tip of the snout, about the width of a thumbnail. The skull's proportions suggest that the animal was about the same size as a bee hummingbird, which would have made the newfound dinosaur lighter than a dime. No creature alive today is built quite like Oculudentavis. “It’s revealing a completely different ecological niche that we never knew existed,” says study coauthor Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist at China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. “It’s fun, but it’s also a total puzzle, and everything about it is so weird.” “This is truly one of the rarest and most spectacular of finds!” University of Central Florida paleontologist Ryan Carney, who wasn’t involved with the study, says in an email. “Like capturing Cretaceous lightning in a bottle, this amber preserves an unprecedented snapshot of a miniature dinosaur skull with exciting new features.” O’Connor speculates that Oculudentavis’s strange features may have developed in its unique prehistoric environment. In ecosystems with limited resources such as islands, evolution can push animals to miniaturize, and the remains of a marine creature called an ammonite suggest the Burmese amber deposits formed on islands, or at least on coastlines. Most scientists now believe that birds are theropods, dinosaurs of a group that included tyrannosaurus and spinosaurus, but that birds were on their own evolutionary branch from a common ancestor. Paleontologists have long assumed that as birds evolved away from other dinosaurs, having teeth was a trait that was in the process of disappearing altogether. “But this specimen strongly shows that evolution’s really going in all different directions,” Dr. O’Connor said. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/science/smallest-dinosaur-amber.html https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/03/smallest-ever-fossil-dinosaur-found-trapped-in-amber/ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
River 127,425 Posted March 11, 2020 Share Posted March 11, 2020 wow pretty amazing the recent findings So sploosh your juice all over me you Riverboy Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahb 17,188 Posted March 11, 2020 Share Posted March 11, 2020 That's really cool but I was hoping it was gonna be the whole head with feathers and all (like that tail they found in amber). Do you feel him sir? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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