Ancient Birds’ Wings Found In Burmese Amber Mines

First Posted: Jun 29, 2016 07:13 AM EDT
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A wing from the era of dinosaurs had been found encased in amber, and it is remarkably similar to modern-day birds.

Reports from the National Geographic said that a nearly 100-million-year-old wing tip was found to have bones, soft tissue, and feathers, similar to the birds today. The tiny wings were said to have the same layers, patterns, and color, as well as arrangement of feathers seen in birds today, leading scientists to think that birds' wings have existed in at least some of their predecessors since the era of dinosaurs.

The study of the wings was published in Nature Communications, and it indicated that they likely to have belonged to hummingbird-sized creatures from the family Enantiornithes, which is part of a group of dinosaurs that can fly, and were believed to have become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Many already believed that dinosaurs were feathered, but knowledge of prehistoric plumage has been scarce. The feather imprints in compression fossils showed arrangement, but they lacked very fine details and rarely were able to preserve information on color. Unfortunately, feathers in amber cannot be associated with the animal that they originally came from, either.

Although they appeared black to the naked eye, microscopic analysis of the flight feathers revealed them to be mostly dark brown, with covert feathers ranging from pale brown to silver or white bands.

The specimen, according to The Washington Post, was discovered in amber extracted from the mines of Burma, and they were able to illuminate details that the scientists don't often see. The wings are also said to reveal one thing about Enantiornithes that scientists were not able to prove before: they were born fully developed.

"They were coming out of the egg with feathers that looked like flight feathers, claws at the end of their wing," Ryan McKellar, a curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada said. "It basically implies they were able to function without their parents very early on."

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