Remarkable feathered dinosaur tail found encased in amber

National Geographic reports that a fully intact tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur was found preserved in amber, according to a report published Thursday in Current Biology.

For Lida Xing, a paleontologist based at the China University of Geosciences, scientific progress occasionally calls for some light espionage.

The delicately feathered 1.4-inch tail with bone and tissue intact was frozen in time in a piece of amber originally discovered in a mine in northern Myanmar.

While a dinosaur-era feather had been found embedded in amber in 2011 and again in June 2016, those small specimens preserved just isolated plumage, so researchers were not able to say with certainty whether it belonged to an ancient bird or a dinosaur.

Professor Mike Benton from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, added: “It’s awesome to see all the details of a dinosaur tail – the bones, flesh, skin, and feathers – and to imagine how this little fellow got his tail caught in the resin, and then presumably died because he could not wrestle free”.

The researchers’ first question was what kind of animal this tail belonged to.

The dinosaur feather construction is similar to modern ornamental ones. It could be that dinosaurs with more primitive feathers used them for temperature regulation, camouflage and visual signaling, rather than flight.

The specimen is also yielding information about dinosaur colour, although not to a degree of precision beyond noting pale white on the underside and brown on the upper surface.

CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of the thin tail but researchers believe the tail was likely three times longer, consisting of about 25 vertebrae. The feathers’ structure lacked a well-developed central shaft, or rachis, a feature found in modern bird feathers. In many cases, they appear in the geologic record without any skeletal fossils nearby, making it impossible for scientists to identify their species.

Paleontologists have discovered fossilized dinosaur bones surrounded by compressed feather imprints.

Previous studies on dinosaur coloring have had to rely on the hard task of capturing information from melansomes – tiny structures buried within feathers that give them color – and comparing them with bird feathers. And because barbs and barbules are responsible for iridescent feathers, it seems plausible that feathers first arose as a visual cue for dinosaurs to help attract mates.

Unfortunately, this particular dinosaur may not have been capable of flying, especially if the entire length of the dinosaur tail was covered in the same type of feathers as the sample.

The unique feathers have branching structures on each side that produce both large and small filaments. Eva was most probably the size of a sparrow when it died, but could have grown to be as big as an ostrich.