Dinosaur in amber turns out to be lizard

[Carnoferox]

A new dinosaur, Oculudentavis khaungraae, found in the Late Cretaceous Burmese amber is the smallest ever discovered.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2068-4

Edited March 11, 2020 by Carnoferox

[Piney]

Here's a link with a nice pic.

https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/12/WS5e690b00a31012821727e495.html

and @acute, you can't catch the Cordoba Virus by hitting the link....

[Kaikou]

AAAAAAAAAH. Tiny dino. I want one.

[Orphalesion]

11 minutes ago, Kaikou said:

AAAAAAAAAH. Tiny dino. I want one.

I mean you can get pet dinosaurs that are as tiny as 4 inches, head to tail. Not quite as small as this one apparently was, but still pretty small.

[Kaikou]

1 minute ago, Orphalesion said:

I mean you can get pet dinosaurs that are as tiny as 4 inches, head to tail. Not quite as small as this one apparently was, but still pretty small.

I'm kind of drunk. Got excited for awhile, but eventually realised that you were talking about birds or Lizards.
Then I remembered that you can get birds or Lizards as pets.
Not angry at you, just myself.
 

[Carnoferox]

There is now dissent arising about this specimen; some researchers think it might be a lizard and not a dinosaur.

http://theropoddatabase.blogspot.com/2020/03/oculudentavis-is-not-theropod.html

[Skulduggery]

Jingmai has been posting cool updates about this on Facebook. I'm a big fan of her work.

[Carnoferox]

1 hour ago, Skulduggery said:

Jingmai has been posting cool updates about this on Facebook. I'm a big fan of her work.

Has she addressed the lizard identity yet? There are a large amount of researchers from all over (USA, UK, Italy, China, etc.) that are now considering it a lizard.

http://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/3/10/hummingbird-sized-archaic-birds-of-cretaceous

http://theropoda.blogspot.com/2020/03/dubbi-sullo-stato-dinosauriano-e-aviano.html

http://ivpp.cas.cn/kxcb/kpdt/202003/t20200313_5514594.html

[Skulduggery]

1 minute ago, Carnoferox said:

Has she addressed the lizard identity yet? There are a large amount of researchers from all over (USA, UK, Italy, China, etc.) that are now considering it a lizard.

http://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/3/10/hummingbird-sized-archaic-birds-of-cretaceous

http://theropoda.blogspot.com/2020/03/dubbi-sullo-stato-dinosauriano-e-aviano.html

http://ivpp.cas.cn/kxcb/kpdt/202003/t20200313_5514594.html

Nothing being said yet.

[Carnoferox]

12 minutes ago, Skulduggery said:

Nothing being said yet.

I've heard rumors (note: just rumors) that lead author Lida Xing mislead Jingmai and the other authors about the nature of Oculudentavis. Allegedly he knew of specimens with preserved postcrania that showed it was clearly a lizard.

[Carnoferox]

There is now a formal response from a group of Chinese paleontologists out in preprint form, which concludes that Oculudentavis is indeed a lizard.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.16.993949v1.full.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3UpU2hxL4mh8gxEkDWnxprx-TftdRCpMRfR8X9q-jbVmh3m-9HHGecrxI

Could a moderator change the title of this thread to something like “Dinosaur in amber turns out to be lizard”? The current title is misleading now.

Edited March 19, 2020 by Carnoferox

[Carnoferox]

The Oculudentavis paper has now been officially retracted from Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2553-9

https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/22/a-big-nature-study-on-a-tiny-dinosaur-is-being-retracted/

https://www.livescience.com/amp/retraction-smallest-dinosaur.html

Edited July 24, 2020 by Carnoferox

[Carnoferox]

A second specimen of Oculudentavis with preserved postcrania and scales confirms that it is a lizard.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.09.243048v1

[Lepophagus]

1 hour ago, Carnoferox said:

A second specimen of Oculudentavis with preserved postcrania and scales confirms that it is a lizard.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.09.243048v1

Any pictures of the second specimen? Still sounds like quite an interesting looking find. 

[Carnoferox]

13 minutes ago, Lepophagus said:

Any pictures of the second specimen? Still sounds like quite an interesting looking find. 

They're in the pdf.

[Eldorado]

World’s ‘Smallest Dinosaur’ Revealed to Be a Mystery Reptile

Paleontologists analyzed two skulls and made the call, but aren’t sure about the exact type of animal they’ve discovered.

The original Oculudentavis fossil is preserved in a chunk of amber from the southeast Asian country of Myanmar. When it was presented in Nature in March of 2020, outside researchers quickly pointed out that Oculudentavis was not really a bird. The fossil seemed to represent a small reptile that simply resembled a bird thanks to a large eye opening in the skull and a narrow, almost beak-like snout.

The original Nature paper was retracted and a reanalysis of the paper’s dataset by another team supported the idea that the fossil wasn’t a bird. A second specimen soon turned up and appeared in a pre-print the same year, adding evidence that these fossils were far from the avian perch on the tree of life. That study has since evolved into the Current Biology paper on what Oculudentavis might be, and it suggests that this bird was really a lizard.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/worlds-smallest-dinosaur-revealed-be-mystery-reptile-180977975/

Edited June 15, 2021 by Eldorado