Two chunks of amber preserved the wings of baby birds 99 million years ago, opened new discoveries about ancient hatchlings' behavior.
These newly discovered walnut-brown, hatchlings hadn't grown larger than today's hummingbirds when they got stuck on the sticky goopy tree resin. The newborn enantiornithes were taking their first flights and stumbling out of the nest and into to the sticky trap.
99 million years later, the resin around those tiny wings hardened, preserving them completely with bones, tissue, feathers, and all.
These chunks of amber are about the size of ping-pong balls. And the wings embedded in it are just fragments, a few bones of the tip of the bird's wing with feathers fanning across them.
Enantiornithines had plumage that looked a lot like adult bird plumage, even when they were just hatchlings.
Now, looking into the bones of these amber-encased wings, scientists were able to tell that these birds were quite young. But their adult-like feathers suggests that the hatchlings may have been able to fly "right out of the egg, or right out of the nest," as said by Dr. Ryan McKellar to Christian Science Monitor.
According to the lead author, Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences in Beijing, these birds did not hang about in the nest waiting to be fed, but set off looking for food, and sadly died perhaps because of their small size and lack of experience.
Unlike the bone fossils which only leaves imprints of tissues, fur or feathers; amber fossils preserve everything that is in it, the whole organism, tissue and all.
In life, these little birds had walnut-brown coloring on the upper side of their wings, with a paler band running across their wings. The wings' underside was very pale, perhaps even white. Two long, ribbon-like tail feathers trailed behind the tiny birds' bodies. In their beaks, these young enantiornithines had teeth.
"They're thought to be some of the closest relatives to modern birds," McKellar says.
Fossils that are 25 million years older than these amber pieces provide the same information about the plumage of enantiornithines: differentiation among the wing feathers as well as details of their color patterns.
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
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