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It's a beautiful day in ancient Burma. The sun warms the earth under your birdlike dinosaur feet. You scratch a bit at the ground with the sharp little claws that still protrude from your transitional dinosaur-bird wings. You're still young, a fledgling, and it feels great to wander around a bit.
Then something catches your attention — maybe a predator. You turn and move, not paying close attention to where you're going. And then splat. Your wing sticks deep into a pile of tree resin. You're tiny, standing just several inches high, and not strong enough to pull yourself free. Yet you're still alive, terrified. You squirm, leaving scratch marks in the hard, sucking sap. But you can't pull yourself free. So that's where you die. Maybe it happens fast, as some larger creature takes advantage of your mistake for a quick snack. Or maybe it's a slow death by exhaustion.
Ninety-nine million years later only your wing remains.
Some version of that scene — we don't know the details — likely played out for some young enantiornithes. Enantiornithes are a kind of transitional birdlike dinosaur. An amazing paper published Tuesday examines two baby dinosaur wings found trapped in amber with their feathers, and skin still attached. And its most interesting detail is that one of the two creatures was still alive when it got trapped, and seems to have scratched at the goop as it died.
Amber is fossilized tree sap, which can preserve biomass much better than common fossils. That's incredibly useful for researchers, because it means nearly-complete dino wings can travel 99 million years through time for their examination. But for some poor little baby dino-bird, it meant catching its wing in some sticky goop that held it fast, squirming and scratching until it died.
Kind of a dark little nugget to stick in a science paper, but it offers a rare glimpse into a 99-million-year old moment of high drama. It makes you realize that all these old bones we're used to seeing in museums represent real living things that roamed the planet and lived full lives of their own, before passing their bodies into posterity.
The signs of this young dinosaur's squirmings are hard to see with the naked eye. But the researchers who studied the well-preserved dinosaur wings found "bidirectional claw marks" in the amber, along with other evidence that this creature was still moving when it died. The photo labeled "k" in the image above shows some of these marks, with the yellow arrows indicating the direction the claws moved.
Poor little 99-million-year-old dino-bird. Thanks for unwittingly donating your body to science.
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