Scientists recently discovered the skull of a tiny bird-like dinosaur that may have been the least known species in the Mesozoic era – the time when giant dinosaurs such as brachiosaurus, stegosaurus, and allosaurus evolved.
The sample is preserved in a lump of 99 million-year-old amber from the north of Myanmar and is just 7.1 millimeters long, suggesting that the whole animal may be even smaller than a ball- bee mushroom, which at about 2.25 inches is the smallest bird. Very small fossils like this one are rare to find because layers of mud and rock usually destroy the delicate figs. Amber preserves them completely.
Jingmai O’Connor, the paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing found the skull inside the amber, and her colleagues found that there were more than 100 teeth in the jaws – including, despite its size, the creature was a predator, possibly infested with insects. However, because eye sockets contradict each other, they may not have had a binocular view, which gives many other predators a deep view to capture prey. The conical shape of the bones in these eye sockets indicates that the animal had relatively small pupils and appeared to be active during the day. The findings were published in the journal Nature.
Because of its eyes and teeth, the researchers named the new species Oculudentavis khaungraae. Oculudentavis comes from the Latin words for eye (oculus), teeth (teeth), and eun (avis), and khaungraae comes from Khuang Ra, which had donated amber to the Hupoge Amber Museum in China.
While scientists have discovered several fossils of giant dinosaurs from the Mesozoic period – and pop culture as the Jurassic Park Permission likes to take advantage of the public not to stop with large animals – there is less information about the lowest dinosaurs of the century.
“People focus on how big dinosaurs were,” O’Connor tells Mental Floss. “Now we know they were very small too.”
Perhaps amber, a tree resin that has hardened over millions of years, is our best hope for learning more.
“When you have an animal kept in amber, it looks like it died yesterday. All the soft stuff in place, locked in this little window into old times, ”O’Connor explains in the video above.
The researchers publish the full study in the scientific journal Nature, but there are still many questions to be answered.
“This paper simply scratches the surface of the information that has been retained. Is the skull rotted or is the original material unaltered, preserved in the amber? Mummified, if you will? What color was it, and can we use isotopes to find out exactly what it ate; can we rebuild the brain better? O’Connor says. “We need to develop the younger, tech-savvy generation, new ways to extract data from amber samples in a non-destructive way to access these questions.”
In the meantime, dig into these 26 fascinating facts about fossils.