Meet the smallest dinosaur ever found
A tiny skull of a wee predator that lived 99 million years ago is in all likelihood that of the smallest species of dinosaur found. Picture a hummingbird. With fangs.
An international team of palaeopathologists named this dinosaur Oculudentavis khaungraae – the first name, its genus, borrowed from Latin for ‘‘eye-teeth-bird"; the second, its species, after a person named Khaung Ra, who donated the amber-encased skull to China’s Hupoge Amber Museum. The skull and its toothy beak, described in the journal Nature yesterday, are the only remains the palaeopathologists had to work with.
Minus the snout, the skull measures about seven millimetres long. This dino head could rest, with area to spare, on the cap of a triple-A battery.
‘‘It’s smaller than the skulls that we find in hummingbirds,’’ said study author Lars Schmitz, a palaeobiologist at the Keck Science Centre in California. Birds are living dinosaurs, of which bee hummingbirds are the tiniest. But, extrapolating its body size from its skull, this newly discovered dinosaur could compete in size with the bee hummingbird.
‘‘If it’s indeed a dinosaur, it’s definitely the smallest known extinct dinosaur,’’ said Ohio University palaeontologist Lawrence Witmer, an expert in dinosaur heads who was not involved with the research.
Oculudentavis ‘‘rivals the smallest avian dinosaurs – birds – known today,’’ he said.
Its large eye, domed skull and tapered, slender snout are characteristics of dinosaurs – and, more specifically, ancient birds.
The researchers’ analysis placed the animal ‘‘fairly deep in the origin of birds,’’ Schmitz said, but with a ‘‘lot of uncertainty.’’
Without a skeleton to study, the scientists do not know whether the dinosaur could fly.
The fossil has a strange mixture of lizard and birdlike traits. ‘‘It’s so tiny that it must be miniaturised, and evolutionary miniaturisation can mess with the anatomy,’’ Witmer said.
He added: ‘‘It would be superhelpful to know what kind of body was attached to that weird skull.’’
‘‘I accept that it’s an adult and not a young animal,’’ Witmer said, ‘‘which makes it all the more intriguing.’’
– Washington Post