The tail of a 99 million-year-old dinosaur has been found preserved in amber in what scientists have called a “once in a lifetime” discovery.
Though you might expect that the find was made at an excavation site, it was actually spotted by a Chinese paleontologist at an amber market in Myanmar.
Speaking to CNN, Xing Lida said: “I realised that the content was a vertebrate, probably theropod, rather than any plant. I was not sure that (the trader) really understood how important this specimen was, but he did not raise the price.”
It is the first time that the actual mummified bones of a dinosaur have been discovered. The small tail, roughly the size of a dried apricot, is believed to have belonged to a young coelurosaurian — a dinosaur from the same family as the tyrannosaurus.
The finding has also put another nail in the coffin of the typical idea of the scaly dinosaur, as feathers are immediately visible on the sample.
Beautiful #dinofuzz found in amber! “A Feathered Dinosaur Tail,” 99 million years old—via @arstechnica by @Annaleen https://t.co/mPCgSUgCtY pic.twitter.com/gxf1gXC7ub
— Lorena Barba @labarba@fosstodon.org (@LorenaABarba) December 8, 2016
https://twitter.com/SketchTheSith/status/806966038852227072
Ryan McKellar, a paleontologist at the Royal Saskatchwan Museum in Canada who has co-written a paper on the find said: “The more we see these feathered dinosaurs and how widespread the feathers are, things like a scaly velociraptor seem less and less likely and they’ve become a lot more bird like in the overall view,” he said.
Hopefully this takes Jurassic Park that step closer to reality…
