Discovery of smallest known mesozoic dinosaur reveals new species in bird evolution

Amber ! Birds and dinosaurs living together in their own social pecking order...Add a non feathery tail and some teeth and many birds would pass for a dino.. there have been genetic attempts at turning on certain repressed genes with chickens and the results are a tail and teeth.

It is strange I came across this article today for earlier I was sat outside a coffee shop watching two Sparrows fight like I have never seen Sparrows fight before. The fight went on for over 30 minutes with little breaks and fly-offs to catch their breath then they were back at it again. They were rolling on the ground and pecking and biting each other...there must have been a female involved someplace safely out of flogging range? hahah

The discovery of a small, bird-like skull, described in an article published in Nature, reveals a new species, Oculudentavis khaungraae, that could represent the smallest known Mesozoic dinosaur in the fossil record.

While working on fossils from in northern Myanmar, Lars Schmitz, associate professor of biology at the W.M. Keck Science Department, and a team of international researchers discovered a seemingly mature skull specimen preserved in Burmese amber. The specimen's size is on par with that of the bee hummingbird, the smallest living bird.

"Amber preservation of vertebrates is rare, and this provides us a window into the world of dinosaurs at the lowest end of the body-size spectrum," Schmitz said. "Its unique anatomical features point to one of the smallest and most ancient birds ever found."

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a reply to: 727Sky

there have been genetic attempts at turning on certain repressed genes with chickens and the results are a tail and teeth.

The strange thing is , all chickens have a tail and bony ridges in their beaks that resemble the appearance of teeth while in the early stages of development.

The taxon Oculudentavis khaungraae has since been reclassified as a lizard (Bolet et al. 2021). A second species of this genus, O. naga, is described by Bolet et al. (2021). In retrospect, instead of being the oldest small-sized bird, Oculudentavis shows that a few Cretaceous lizards evolved a bird-like skull.

Bolet, A., Stanley, E. L., Daza, J. D., Salvador Arias, J., Čerňanský, A., Vidal-García, M., Bevitt, J. J., Peretti, A., Evans, S. E., 2021. Unusual morphology in the mid-Cretaceous lizard Oculudentavis. Current Biology 31 (15): 3303–3314.e3. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.05.040.

It’s a fairly evil looking creature in the mockup.

Cool discovery.