Come on, let me see you shake your tail feather. Announcing their discovery in the journal Current Biology, scientists found a 99-million-year-old dinosaur tail covered in fine feathers, including bones and soft tissue, perfectly preserved in amber. While individual feathers have been found in amber, and other evidence captured in fossil impressions, this is the first time scientists have been able to study feathers still attached to a dinosaur.
We’re extremely lucky palaeontologist Dr Lida Xing was searching an amber market in Myanmar last year, near the Chinese border, where he spotted the relic. The tail fragment is believed to be from a young sparrow-sized dinosaur that lived in the Cretaceous period.
More info and photos at National Geographic. And I managed to go the entire post without referencing Jurassic Park!
