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99-million-year-old bird fossil has been found preserved in amber and it's truly exquisite

What a beauty.

We might just be one step closer to a real life Jurassic Park scenario.

A three-inch fossil of a 99-million-year-old baby bird was found in an amber mine in Myanmar.

The hatchling is the most complete bird preserved in amber that has ever been found from the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Gondwana Research. The fossil includes most of the skull and neck, part of a wing and hind leg, and soft tail tissue.

Scientists were able to collect data from bone and tissue samples taken from its skull, neck, feet, and wing, and they determined that the hatching was a member of the avian group, Enantiornithes.

Researchers determined that the baby bird was newly hatched by examining its plumage. It was no more than a few weeks old before it was trapped in the sticky amber and preserved for millions of years, they found.

The visual details in the baby bird are stunning, which has the science community on Twitter geeking out.

The fossil was purchased in 2014 by the director of the Hupoge Amber Museum in Tengchong City, China, who heard about an amber sample with a strange "lizard claw" inclusion, National Geographic reported.

Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences later identified the claw as the foot of a bird from the Enantiornithes group. Researchers said they're excited about what this new find can bring to the field of paleontology. "Overall, the new specimen brings a new level of detail to our understanding of the anatomy of the juvenile stages of the most species-rich clade of pre-modern birds," they wrote in the study.

Topics Animals

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