Shaggy dino’s tail stuck in amber
A FEATHERED tail from a tiny dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in a lump of amber.
The 99-million-year-old tail, which comes from a sparrow-sized relative of the T-Rex, is the first high-quality example of dinosaur feathers to be preserved.
The ‘astonishing’ fossil was found in a piece of amber on sale at a market in Myitkyina, Burma.
The feathers inside it had originally been mistaken for a plant. But microscopic examination and CT scans confirmed it to be part of the tail of a flightless dinosaur, and not an early species of bird.
Professor Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol, said: ‘It’s amazing to see all the details of a dinosaur tail – the bones, flesh, skin and feathers – and to imagine how this little fellow got his tail caught in the resin, and then presumably died because he could not wrestle free.’
The tail consists of eight vertebrae, but is thought to be just a fragment of a complete tail that may have been three times longer, according to scientists from Bristol, China and Canada.
They said the complete tail would have been ‘long and flexible, with keels of feathers running down each side’.
It comes from a dinosaur from the ‘theropod’ family, which consisted of mostly carnivorous two-legged beasts including the T-Rex, reported the journal Current Biology.