Scientists going after traces of dinosaurs in amber: if movies are to be believed it’s generally the start of something terrible, but, as long as they don’t go building a dinosaur park that goes horribly awry, this might actually be pretty cool.
Some scientists managed to get their mitts on a pair of dinosaur-era wings, fully intact in amber they found in a market in Myitkyina, Myanmar. Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is prized by researchers for its huge diversity of Cretaceous period animal and plant life trapped in amber.
In a paper published yesterday they concluded that the wings are most likely from enantiornitheans, dinosaur birds from the group Enantiornithes (meaning “opposite birds”), and probably around 100 million years old.
Despite our love of showing dinosaurs as huge big nude lizards, it’s been the scientific consensus since the 90s that pretty much all of them were covered in feathers.
The discovery is important because it’s super rare to find intact entire wings (usually they just find fragments) and it helps researchers figure out what the plumage looked like and how it fitted together.
Also hopefully we can use the DNA to bring them back to life. What could possibly go wrong?
Source: National Geographic.
