The tail of a 99-million year old dinosaur has been found entombed in amber, an unprecedented discovery that has blown away scientists.Xing Lida, a Chinese paleontologist found the specimen, the size of a dried apricot, at an amber market in northern Myanmar near the Chinese border.
The remarkable piece was destined to end up as a curiosity or piece of jewelry, with Burmese traders believing a plant fragment was trapped inside.
"I realized that the content was a vertebrate, probably theropod, rather than any plant," Xing told CNN.
"I was not sure that (the trader) really understood how important this specimen was, but he did not raise the price."
. . . The tail section belongs to a young coelurosaurian -- from the same group of dinosaurs as the predatory velociraptors and the tyrannosaurus.
The sparrow-sized creature could have danced in the palm of your hand.
The amber, which weighs 6.5 grams, contains bone fragments and feathers, adding to mounting fossil evidence that many dinosaurs sported primitive plumage rather than scales.
― and this section is called boner (Phil D.), Thursday, 8 December 2016 19:07 (seven years ago) link