https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0952836904006259
This was discovered in 2005, but I missed it first time around.
54 million year old gecko trapped in Baltic amber.
mollwollfumble said:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0952836904006259This was discovered in 2005, but I missed it first time around.
54 million year old gecko trapped in Baltic amber.
Looks like he got trapped.
mollwollfumble said:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0952836904006259This was discovered in 2005, but I missed it first time around.
54 million year old gecko trapped in Baltic amber.
That’s amazing, so well preserved! Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
dv said:
mollwollfumble said:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0952836904006259This was discovered in 2005, but I missed it first time around.
54 million year old gecko trapped in Baltic amber.
That’s amazing, so well preserved! Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
+1
Another amber creature. Is this a dinosaur? Hold on a moment.
From 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51835946
Scientists have discovered what they say is the smallest known dinosaur.
The new species has been described by one team member as the “weirdest fossil” she has ever worked on.
The specimen, from northern Myanmar, consists of a bird-like skull trapped in 99-million-year-old amber.
Writing in the prestigious journal Nature, researchers report that the dinosaur would have been similar in size to the bee hummingbird – the tiniest living bird.
The stunning find may shed light on how small birds evolved from dinosaurs – which were often bigger.
I like the teeth.
But hold on, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/worlds-smallest-dinosaur-revealed-be-mystery-reptile-180977975/
The original Oculudentavis fossil is preserved in a chunk of amber from the southeast Asian country of Myanmar. When it was presented in Nature in March of 2020, outside researchers quickly pointed out that Oculudentavis was not really a bird. The fossil seemed to represent a small reptile that simply resembled a bird thanks to a large eye opening in the skull and a narrow, almost beak-like snout. The original Nature paper was retracted and a reanalysis of the paper’s dataset by another team supported the idea that the fossil wasn’t a bird. A second specimen soon turned up and appeared in a pre-print the same year, adding evidence that these fossils were far from the avian perch on the tree of life. That study has since evolved into the Current Biology paper on what Oculudentavis might be, and it suggests that this bird was really a lizard.
How could a lizard be mistaken for a bird in the first place?
