Skull of smallest known dinosaur found preserved in 99-million year-old amber
CNN said:The complete skull of a previously unknown species of bird-like dinosaur has been discovered trapped in a chunk of 99-million-year-old amber.
Smaller than the size of the tiniest hummingbird alive today, its head was the size of a thumbnail, its jaw packed with serrated teeth and its eyes bulging and lizard-like. Despite its teeny-tiny stature, the creature was likely a predator.
The researchers said the fossil, named Oculudentavis, represented the smallest dinosaur ever found.
"When I first saw this specimen, it really blew my mind. I literally have never seen anything like this," said Jingmai O'Connor, senior professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and a research associate at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
"There's over 100 teeth present in the jaws. These weird eyes sticking off looking to the side. There's nothing like this alive today."
While people tend to think of dinosaurs as huge, lumbering creatures, this skull and other recent finds in amber suggest that life in dinosaur times was probably more diverse than we think, with many more tiny dinosaurs and other creatures that haven't yet showed up in the fossil record.
"One of the key messages from this study is that we are probably missing a big chunk of the ecosystem of the dinosaurs," said Lars Schmitz, a biology professor at Scripps College in Claremont, California, who along with O'Connor, authored the paper that published Wednesday in the journal Nature. "We don't know a lot about tiny things in the age of the dinosaurs."
The fossilization of bones in sediments such as clay, silt and sand can crush and destroy the remains of small animals, but amber, which forms from the resin of coniferous trees, allows for their preservation in three dimensions.
"When you have an animal preserved in amber it looks like it just died yesterday -- all the soft tissue in place trapped into this little window into an ancient time," said O'Connor.
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