This ancient bird hatchling preserved in amber provides insights into early bird evolution
This article was originally posted at Amazing Zoology . View original article at http://amzoo.in/4yfu- Image Credit: Authors of the publication at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2017.06.001 Scientists have recently made an incredible discovery of a piece of amber that contained well preserved remains of an alomost complete bird hatchling. The discovery was made from Burma. The research team suspects that the little bird fell into a pool of conifer sap in the early stages of its development, mostly soon after it hatched, and got trapped in the glue like plant sap. The amber had fossilied remains of head, neck, wings and tail of a bird hatchling. The interesting thing is that the amber had perfectly preserved the feathers, claws and flesh. The arrangement of feathers and its attachemnt in skin, microstructure of the feather and pigmentation patters could easily be studied from the specimen. The hatchling had an unusual kind of feather arrangement where the flight feathers were combined wit...