Bird wings trapped in amber are a fossil first from the age of dinosaurs

[mobilehaathi]

This is a fascinating find, and it's mind boggling to be able to view this delicate 99 Myo organic material preserved so well.

Two tiny wings locked in amber 99 million years ago suggest that in the middle of the Cretaceous period — when dinosaurs still walked the planet — bird feathers already looked a lot like they do today.

A team of researchers led by Lida Xing, a palaeontologist at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, recovered a first for the time period: a few cubic centimetres of amber from northeastern Myanmar that contained the partial remains of two bird wings. The specimens include bone, feathers and skin, according to a study published on 28 June in Nature Communications1.

Prior evidence of bird plumage from the Cretaceous, which stretched from 145 million to 66 million years ago, came from 2D impressions left in sedimentary rocks and feathers that had been preserved in amber but that gave no skeletal clues to their species of origin

http://www.nature.com/news/bird-win...ossil-first-from-the-age-of-dinosaurs-1.20162

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160628/ncomms12089/full/ncomms12089.html

 

[S.B.G]

Very cool indeed. I love reading about this stuff!

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Very cool indeed. I love reading about this stuff!

Agreed. I love reading about this stuff, too; it is absolutely fascinating.

Thanks for drawing our attention to this, @mobilehaathi.

Great story; I had spotted the headline on the BBC but was otherwise distracted from following it up.

 

[aaronvan]

Are they sure it's from a bird? Could be T-Rex feathers.

 

[rhett7660]

And this is when and where the real "Jurassic Park" seed is planted and in a few short years...........

 

[mobilehaathi]

Are they sure it's from a bird? Could be T-Rex feathers.

Seems so:

The majority of preserved osteological features suggest that the wings belonged to a relatively derived avialan (more derived than Archaeopteryx, Sapeornis, or Confuciusornis). The specimens can be confidently placed within Paraves based on the following skeletal features: only three digits are present; the major digit bears highly asymmetrical feathers; and major digit-1 is longer than the subsequent phalanx. More importantly, the presence of a minor metacarpal longer than the major metacarpal is a synapomorphy for Enantiornithes.