It is 99-million-year-old and it’s the best preserved of its kind

Kristin Romey, a staff writer covering archaeology and paleontology for National Geographic, affirms the remains of a baby bird has been discovered in a specimen of 99-milion-year-old amber.

According to scientists from Gondwana Research, the hatchling belonged to a major group of birds known as enantiornithes. They went extinct along with dinosaurs at the end of Cretaceous period (about 65 million years ago).

These ancient toothed birds are totally different from modern birds. This is the best preserved and the most complete fossil discovered in Burmese Amber.

Mined in the Hukawng Valley in northern Myanmar, Burmese amber deposits contain possibly the largest variety of animal and plant life from the Cretaceous period, which lasted from 145.5 to 65.5 million years ago.

Researches could determine that the bird was only in its first days of life and it’s literally frozen in time. It possessed a full set of flight feathers on its wings and the rest of plumage was sparse (similar to dinosaur feathers)

The fossilized specimen was purchased in Myanmar in 2014 by Guang Chen, director of the Hupoge Amber Museum in Tengchong City, China, after he had heard about an amber sample with a strange “lizard claw” inclusion, says Kristin Romey.