Secrets about the world's smallest dinosaur revealed in amber 99 million years old

Recently, an international team of archaeologists found an amber stone estimated to be 99 million years old in the northern Kachin province of Myanmar. However, what makes the global scientists 'wave' is a part of the skull measuring just 31mm x 20 mm x 8.5mm of animals that look almost like today's birds, preserved almost intact. integrity inside the amber tablet.

After a series of in-depth analyzes and assessments, it was concluded that the skull belonged to an Oculudentavis khaungraae - a microscopic, flying-like dinosaur. flies, and lives in the middle of the Cretaceous, from a period called Cenomanian, more than 100 million years ago.

To reach this conclusion, researchers from China and the United States resorted to CT analysis techniques (computed tomography, using X-rays to produce a series of cross-sectional images of the sample. ) to examine the inner structure of the skull. From the data collected, they successfully recreated the 3D image of a typical Oculudentavis khaungraae with a length of 5cm, weighs about 28gr, which is smaller than the current hummingbird. This microscopic dinosaur has a long, slender beak, a mouth with pointed teeth (about 100) and large eyes, similar to those of lizards. The animal's skull still appears to be made up of actual bones, although the microstructure and cell content have not been specifically analyzed.

More specifically, the skin in the area of ​​the mouth and tongue is preserved quite intact.

Researchers have shown that animals that evolve for smaller body sizes tend to come from isolated environments like islands. For example, there have been dwarf mammoths on Crete, Sardinia and Cyprus. Coincidentally, geologists also discovered that Myanmar's large amber mines were formed on an island hundreds of millions of years ago that was part of a volcanic arc on the edge of the ancient Thethys Ocean. Great.

Unfortunately in this amber only store the head of the animal. However, it is possible that the body is also preserved in another amber that we have yet to discover.

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