Tiny bird’s wings trapped in amber 99 million years ago

01 July 2016 - 16:33 By Bruce Gorton

Back when dinosaurs walked the earth‚ a tiny bird fought a different danger - sticky resin that covered its wings‚ trapping it for millions of years.According to Nature the a team of researchers led by Lida Xing‚ a palaeontologist at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing found the remains of two wings trapped in amber in north eastern Myanmar. “The specimens in our study provide the first records of feathers in amber that have been preserved alongside skeletal material – previous work has involved isolated feathers that are difficult to tie to a particular group of birds‚” Ryan Mckellar‚ a lead author on the study on the feathers that was published in Nature‚ told Researchgate. “Amber tends to only trap and preserve small insects and fragments of larger animals‚ but it preserves specimens in unmatched detail. Compression fossils (those preserved in sedimentary rocks) face limitations‚ because sediment size and chemistry influences the amount of 3-D detail recorded‚” Mckellar explainedThe amber shows claw marks‚ meaning one of the birds died struggling for its freedom.“The colour patterns are preserved; the exact arrangement of feathers in three dimensions relative to the bone are preserved‚” Peter Makovicky‚ a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago‚ Illinois said.According to the researchers the bones were smaller than a hummingbird's‚ and incompletely developed - meaning that they were hatchlings‚ probably of a primitive species that still had teeth and clawed wings.All birds in that group went extinct around the same time as the dinosaurs‚ about 66 million years ago...

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