In elementary school, learning about dinosaurs fascinated me. Even though I’d never have a chance to meet the creatures in person (and nor would I want to for my own safety), it was intriguing to learn about animals like these that flourished before our time and the theories tied to their eventual extinction.
What’s even more fascinating is that scientists are still learning about dinosaurs. It’s those missing pieces to the puzzle that are so thrilling! And, well, long since I’ve graduated from elementary school, plenty of new information came out, including the discovery of a very tiny, bird-like dinosaur that was smaller than the size of a hummingbird!
That bird-like creature is called a bee hummingbird. The dinosaur was recently found preserved in amber in northern Myanmar that is believed to be 99-million-years-old. And, on March 11, 2020, researchers released a paper on the critter.
According to researchers, the skull of the preserved dinosaur, whose bones are fused together indicating that it’s an adult, is about the size of an average human adult thumb nail from the back of the dinosaur’s head to the tip of its beak.
Really, they were quite an interesting species.
“They’re sort of our neat little guys that scurried around on tree trunks … that still had claws in their wings and still had teeth in their snout,” explained Ryan McKellar, a Canadian paleontologist at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina.
The researchers believe that the bird/dinosaur resided in a tropical forest amongst frogs, lizards, various insects, and the like. While the presumed life of the bee hummingbird, as well as its overall appearance, closely resembles the modern bird, it’s really considered a dinosaur because it hadn’t finished evolving into the bird we know today. And, as many know, the theory is that modern birds once evolved from dinosaurs.
In other words, the bee hummingbird was not only the smallest dinosaur to have ever existed as far as we are aware, but it appears to have been a very evolved, later-stage type of dinosaur compared to the massive, ground-dwelling dinos we used to see in school books. Cool!
Quickly glancing at photographs of the extinct animal, it may be hard to believe that it could be a dinosaur at all. However, it doesn’t look completely like a bird and still shares commonalities with its other dinosaur counterparts. For one, the species’ beak contained sharp teeth and claws in their wings, as McKellar discussed. Secondly, researchers noted that the creature’s lizard-like eyes are more sideways than modern birds and that their pupils narrow in bright light, which suggests that it was active during the daytime.
“So [it was] maybe even better adapted for escaping as prey as opposed to actually hunting things,” explained McKellar.
So interesting!
Check out images of the bee hummingbird below. Would you say it looks more like a bird or more like a dinosaur?
