Beautiful Feathered Dinosaur Tail Trapped in Amber

Some 99 million years ago, a juvenile dinosaur got its feathery tail stuck in tree resin, a death trap for the small creature. But its misfortune is now giving scientists unique insight into feathered dinosaurs that prospered during the Cretaceous Period. Researchers said on Thursday a chunk of amber - fossilized resin - spotted by a Chinese scientist in a market in Myitkyina, Myanmar, last year contained 1.4 inches (36 mm) of the tail of the dinosaur, complete with bones, flesh, skin and feathers. The dinosaur itself was no more than 6 inches (15 cm) long, about the size of a sparrow.

"This is the first of its kind," said paleontologist Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, one of the researchers involved in the study published in the journal Current Biology. "I'm blown away."

The scientists suspect the tail belonged to a type of two-legged, bird-like dinosaur called a maniraptoran, one of several groups of dinosaurs that possessed feathers. Birds, which first appeared about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, evolved from small, feathered dinosaurs. The researchers used sophisticated scanning and microscopic observations to study the tail. They determined it boasted a chestnut-brown upper surface, with a pale or white underside, a pattern known as countershading. Read the full article.