Discovery: ' 99 Million Year Old Oculudentavis Found in Amber is a Lizard Not a Bird

 There's a new dinosaur-era discovery found in Myanmar (Burma). It's a weird looking lizard that lived 99 million years ago, and was preserved in amber. The creature was originally identified as a small bird, but that was corrected when scientists discovered some oddities in the skull, and had to re-classify the creature as a lizard. Here's the amazing story from Live Science. 

(Image: Oculudentavis naga, as depicted in this artist's reconstruction, was a bizarre lizard that researchers initially struggled to categorize. They are still unsure of its exact position in the lizard family tree. (Image credit: Stephanie Abramowicz/Peretti Museum Foundation/Current Biology))

'Strange beast' in amber is a very weird lizard

By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer  June  15, 2021  Live Science

Oculudentavis lived about 99 million years ago in what is now Myanmar.

A fossil locked in a piece of amber dating to about 99 million years ago belongs to a newfound and highly bizarre species of extinct lizard. The fossil also helped scientists revise the lineage of another amber-locked discovery, also dating to that part of the Cretaceous period (145.5 million to 65.5 million years ago), that was originally thought to be the smallest known ancient bird.

ORIGINAL CLASSIFICATION - When researchers described the hummingbird-size Oculudentavis khaungraae in March 2020, it was hailed as the tiniest dinosaur ever found (birds are a lineage of dinosaurs that survive to the present). But the specimen had a number of features that hinted it might be a lizard, and the journal retracted the study in July 2020, Live Science previously reported.

The new find, dubbed Oculudentavis naga, is a more complete specimen than O. khaungraae, having an intact skull and part of its spine and shoulders. After analyzing O. naga bone by bone, scientists determined that despite having some birdlike features it was a lizard — albeit a very strange lizard — and so was its "bird" cousin, according to a new study. 

FOSSILS TRAPPED IN AMBER -  Amber fossils form after an animal or plant becomes trapped in sticky resin from a coniferous tree. Over time, as the resin hardens into amber around the organic matter, it seals the organism away from oxygen and bacteria, and protects it from decay and environmental wear, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley. These fossils often retain soft tissue, such as the feathered wings torn from a bird, a feathered dinosaur's tail and an ancient lizard's tongue. Amber can also preserve rare instances of animal behavior — a 41 million-year-old insect sex romp, for instance. Many amber fossils dating to the Cretaceous come from Kachin province in Myanmar — both Oculudentavis specimens came from the province's Aung Bar mine, according to the new study.

WHAT ARE THE ODDITIES - The fossil had "a strange-looking bone" directly in front of the eye socket that was unlike anything seen in most lizards, Stanley said. There's also a bone at the back of the jaw called a quadrate that attaches the lower jaw to the top of the skull and the braincase — that's also very lizardlike in both specimens. 

 "The fact that a lizard skull — the first specimen, the holotype of Oculudentavis khaungraae — could be misidentified as a bird is a good indication that this reptile is a really unusual one," said lead study author Arnau Bolet, a research fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona's Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology.