“I WAS blown away when I first saw the skull, it’s so well preserved and so damn weird,” says Jingmai O’Connor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “I knew it was so rare.”
This birdlike dinosaur was discovered in northern Myanmar and has been analysed by O’Connor and her colleagues. It is 99 million years old and the smallest dinosaur ever found from the Mesozoic era.
CT scans revealed that the creature, named Oculudentavis or “eye tooth bird”, had bulging eyes and sharp teeth (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2068-4). Its narrow eye sockets would only have let in limited light, suggesting it was most active during the day.
The skull measures just 1.4 centimetres across, indicating it may have been smaller than any bird living today, but the jaw shape suggests it had a powerful bite. “It was probably smaller than the bee hummingbird,” says O’Connor.
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