We think of dinosaurs as big and birds as small. The connection between the two types of animals is displayed in a very small piece of amber with a 99-million-year-old skull inside. The skull is only 7 millimeters long and belongs to the newly-named species Oculudentavis khaungraae, a bird-like dinosaur discovered in Myanmar.
Using high-resolution synchrotron CT scanning, the researchers were able to study the fossil in exquisite detail, without having to crack it open. The skull measures just 7.1 millimeters in length, which is comparable in size to the skull of a bee hummingbird, the smallest modern bird living today.
“The discovery suggests that miniature body sizes in birds evolved earlier than previously recognized, and might provide insights into the evolutionary process of miniaturization,” wrote Roger Benson, a paleobiologist from the University of Oxford who wasn’t involved with the research, in a Nature News & Views article. “In this case, weighing perhaps 2 grams, Oculudentavis is about one-sixth of the size of the smallest known early fossil bird. This indicates that, only shortly after their origins late in the Jurassic period (which lasted from about 201 million to 145 million years ago), birds had already attained their minimum body sizes.”
This is one strange creature. It had plenty of teeth, and eyes that were like a lizard in some ways, like an owl in other way. Read about this discovery and what it tells us about the history of dinosaurs and birds at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Lida Xing)