A groundbreaking discovery in a remote location in the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar has floored the scientific community.
Scientists have just made an absolutely stunning find, one that could totally change our understanding of ancient birds. They’ve discovered a baby bird preserved in a 99 million year old piece of amber found in Myanmar, and it’s one of the most detailed specimens ever.
The specimen has scales, feathers, and claws, and was found in a hotspot where many amber deposits ranging from 145.5 to 65.5 million years old. And it’s a once in a lifetime find, said one expert in a recent interview.
“We’ve had more complete specimens, where you get more of the skeleton preserved, from compression fossils, but never with this level of detail,” Ryan McKellar, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, told CBC News. “It’s like a little diorama.”
The specimen was found in a commercial amber mine by a miner in 2014. He had thought it to be a lizard claw, but experts later determined it was the foot of a small bird.
“We report on the most complete bird preserved encased in Amber uncovered to date, including most of the skull and neck, a partial wing and hindlimb, and soft tissue of the tail, the morphologies of which refer this specimen to the Enantiornithes,” the authors wrote in the paper “The proportions of the bird and morphology of the plumage indicate a very young individual, adding the mounting data that the Enantiornithes were highly precocial; however, the scarcity of body feathers represents a distinct departure from living precocial birds.
“The plumage includes filamentous body feathers that resemble proto-feathers, scutellae with distal bristle-structures, mature remiges, and erupting ornamental rectrices, revealing an unexpected diversity of primitive and derived feather morphotypes present in the plumage of early birds.”