Some 100 million years ago in a seaside mangrove overload in what we people now call Myanmar, a truly unusual dinosaur swept about, stalking its insect victim. Its head was just a half-inch long, making it smaller than the tiniest living bird, the bee hummingbird. Its mouth was loaded with needle teeth, which hung over its lower beak, offering it a bit of a derpy vibe. For a bird-like predatory dinosaur, its eyes were oddly positioned on the sides of its head, suggesting it probably didn’t have binocular vision.
The tiny flying dino snagged a bug here, and snagged a bug there. Then it perished in some way. And fortunately for paleontologists, it got covered in sap that solidified into amber, maintaining its skull in incredible information. In spite of it being a speck among its lumbering dinosaur peers, it has continued on through the ages. Now that it has been unearthed by a group of paleontologists, it’s providing alluring ideas to how it lived the most miniature of lives.
It’s likewise raising a great deal of concerns, because, in technical terms, it’s also simply … weird “It just has morphologies that are all over the place, and also has morphologies that differ from any bird or dinosaur at all,” says paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, who coauthored a brand-new paper explaining the specimen in the journal Nature “Due to the fact that it’s so odd and since we just have a skull, it’s really difficult to understand. It’s this really odd evolutionary puzzle.”
Let’s try to put some pieces together. To begin with, O’Connor and her coworkers had to make sure the specimen wasn’t so little just since it was a baby. “Just careless paleontologists name species from juveniles,” O’Connor states. “The morphology is going to alter.” If you believe a