Dinosaur tail feathers encased in amber may hold Jurassic secrets
100-million-year-old gem holds a wealth of clues for scientists
Nearly 100 million years ago, a dinosaur died young in the midst of the forest. Now its tale is being told with the help of its feathery tail, which was preserved for the ages in a chunk of amber.
The sparrow-size reptile was still growing when it perished of unknown causes, perhaps by getting stuck in the tree resin that would eventually entomb it. After its demise, the resin engulfed its tail, eventually hardening into a translucent, topaz-colored gem.
That gem, tail included, has been salvaged from a Burmese mine and subjected to scientific scrutiny. The amber is the first known to contain dinosaur feathering. It safeguarded the fluffy plumage so well that researchers can identify the finest details of the feathers’ structure.
On first seeing the gem, “I was blown away,” says Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, co-author of a new study of the feathers in this week’s Current Bi
ology. “(Studying it) was one of those once-in-a-lifetime-type projects.”
It took an intrepid paleontologist to capture this dinosaur’s tail. In 2015, Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences journeyed to northern Burma. The area is racked with conflict.
Xing had cultivated a series of middlemen, and on this trip, a contact showed him a 11⁄ 2- inch chunk of Cretaceous amber with supposed plant material inside it. Xing realized it was something better.
The amber includes slightly more than an inch of long, snaky, densely feathered dinosaur tail. The scientists’ best guess is that it was a maniraptoran, a longarmed carnivorous dinosaur that walked on two legs. The study’s authors say the sample confirms the idea that the central shaft of bird feathers developed last, after the evolution of short subbranches that sprout from the fibers that make up a feather’s flat surface. The feathers were too flexible for flight, but “would’ve been good for hugging onto things,” such as tree trunks, McKellar says. The dinosaur’s feathers look very much like the feathers found on many modern-day birds, says Teresa Feo, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “I could go pick up a bird skin today and find feathers that look exactly like” those shown in the study, Feo says. “It’s crazy to look at something so old and realize you can find modern examples of it.” Nearly 100 million years after its death, a baby dinosaur’s tail has been found encased in amber, which preserved the animal’s feathers in exquisite and unprecedented detail.