Smallest dinosaur found 'trapped in amber'

By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website

11 March 2020

Scientists have discovered what they say is the smallest known dinosaur.

The new species has been described by one team member as the "weirdest fossil" she has ever worked on.

The specimen, from northern Myanmar, consists of a bird-like skull trapped in 99-million-year-old amber.

Writing in the prestigious journal Nature, researchers report that the dinosaur would have been similar in size to the bee hummingbird - the tiniest living bird.

The stunning find may shed light on how small birds evolved from dinosaurs - which were often bigger.

While the smallest dinosaurs, such as the bird-like Microraptor, weighed hundreds of grams, the bee hummingbird weighs just 2g.

"Animals that become very small have to deal with specific problems, like how to fit all sensory organs into a very small head, or how to maintain body heat," said Prof Jingmai O'Connor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Continued

Myanmar native bird species face extinction

PUBLISHED 5 AUGUST 2019 

MA PE NYEIN

Nine bird species only exclusively seen in Myanmar are facing dangers of going extinct.

There originally were eight bird species but according to the official confirmation from world's bird specialists on June 17, there are now nine bird species in Myanmar.

"It has now become nine species. The recently added breed is the Brown Prinia," said Thet Zaw Naing, from Myanmar Birds and Nature Society.

According to research from world class experts on the brown prinia birds, the Burmese prinia (prina cooki) species was classified as a separate type and was listed as a Myanmar endemic, meaning that it can only be found in Myanmar, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

According to the WCS, 46 of the world’s most threatened bird species are found in Myanmar. Eight of these species are critically endangered, 12 endangered, and 26 have been classified as vulnerable.

"International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has designated the white brown blue bird found in Natma Taung in Chin Hill as endangered species. In the list of IUCN, white brown blue bird and other two birds species are included. Even though some birds are not on the endangered list of IUCN, they are in real danger level of Myanmar. Some should be put in the list of critically endangered species. Otherwise, these species will eventually disappear in Myanmar," continued Thet Zaw Naing.

Read more

Fossil of 99m-year-old bird with unusually long toes found

Ancient bird’s foot is so distinctive palaeontologists declare it a new species

Nur Pirbhai

Thu 11 Jul 2019 16.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 15 Jul 2019 11.58 BST

The fossilised remains of a bizarre, ancient bird that had middle toes longer than its lower legs have been found in a lump of amber from Myanmar.

The elongated toe resembles those seen on lemurs and tree-climbing lizards, and suggests an unusual lifestyle for some of the earliest birds that lived alongside the dinosaurs, researchers said.

“We have the leg of a little 99-million-year-old bird, preserved in amber, that shows a foot morphology unlike any known previously,” said Jingmai O’Connor, a vertebrate palaeontologist and co-author of the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The foot was so distinctive that O’Connor and her team declared the bird, which was probably about the size of a sparrow, a new species, naming it Elektorornis chenguangi. The first part of the name translates to “amber bird”. It is the first bird species to be recognised from amber.

The bird’s foot had four toes, with the third measuring 20% longer than the bird’s lower leg bone, and 41% longer than its second toe.

Scientists compared the bird to the only other known species that has such disproportionately long digits: the aye-aye, a type of lemur which uses its elongated fingers to pry larvae and insects out of tree trunks. The researchers believe that Elektorornis might have used its toes for similar purposes.

Continued

Spoonie’s winter wetland declared protected area

Nanthar Island, Myanmar is a crucial wintering site for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper (Critically Endangered). Thanks to the advocacy of BANCA (BirdLife in Myanmar) and local people, the site has now been designated a protected area.

As Spoonie wades along the shore of Nanthar Island in Myanmar, he uses his unique spatula-shaped beak to sift small invertebrates from the mudflats. Luckily for this little Spoonie, he is standing on protected ground, rich in food and safe from the threat of hunting. However, some of his friends aren’t so lucky. With a tiny population of no more than 456, and still in decline, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper (Critically Endangered) is just one step away from becoming extinct in the wild.

Nanthar Island is not a well-known site for the Spoon-billed sandpiper – but it is nonetheless an important one. Covering a fairly large area of approximately 3,600ha, the island and the nearby Mayyu Estuary in Rakhine state, Myanmar host up to 12% of the global population of Spoon-billed Sandpipers.

In 2008, surveys of the Nanthar area conducted by the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Task Force confirmed this importance. Unfortunately, spoonies that use this habitat as a wintering site are often under threat from hunting by local people. The Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association (BANCA – BirdLife in Myanmar) has been working hard in the area to protect the unique bird from this pressing concern.

Tackling the problem at its source, BANCA assessed the socio-economic situation of the local people. From this, they were able to determine that most people did not really depend on shorebird hunting for their livelihoods, but instead used them to add variety to their own diets. To combat this problem, BANCA teamed up with local partner Rakhine Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association, to conduct education and awareness activities.

5 February 2019

Continued

An international plan to save the Helmeted Hornbill

31 Aug 2018

Illegal hunting and trade has brought this unique hornbill to the brink. But an new ten-year, range-wide conservation plan will ensure the Helmeted Hornbill has a future outside of China's markets

Conservation organizations from across the world have developed an ambitious ten-year plan to save a Critically Endangered bird that has been driven to the brink of extinction by illegal hunting.

The Helmeted Hornbill Rhinoplax vigil has declined sharply in recent years, following soaring demand for its striking red casque – which uniquely among hornbills is solid, and can be carved into decorative artifacts, for which there is huge demand in China.

Currently, a single casque can fetch more than $1,000 on the black market, a price higher than that of ivory. Organized crime networks became involved in the bird’s hunting and trade, and as a result of this unsustainable demand, the Helmeted Hornbill’s numbers have plummeted such that the species was uplisted from Near Threatened to Critically Endangered (the highest possible category) in our 2015 reassessment of the species’ extinction risk.

The Hornbill is found in the forests of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar and Brunei. It is seldom seen, but once spotted is very distinctive, with a wrinkled naked throat, yellow beak, and large red casque for which it is both named and hunted.

Helmeted Hornbills are largely threatened in their habitat by local hunters, who are recruited by organized criminal gangs. In their effort to secure a Helmeted Hornbill, these hunters will shoot down nearly every large hornbill, hoping that it will turn out to be Helmeted. Once killed, the Hornbill heads are smuggled to ports in Java, Kalimantan and Sumatra, and are then most likely transported to  Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

Readmore  

Amazing footage shows incredibly well-preserved 99 million-year-old 'pancake bird' that lived at the time of the dinosaurs encased in amber

Tiny but 'most complete' bird fossil was found trapped in tree sap in Myanmar

A type of 'opposite birds', it lived in the Cretaceous Period alongside dinosaurs

The amber is extremely thin, hence the fossil is nicknamed the 'pandcake bird'

'Game-changing' discovery could shed light on the evolution of ancient birds

By Maggie O'Neill and Tracy You For Mailonline

PUBLISHED: 12:21, 6 February 2018 | UPDATED: 12:44, 6 February 2018

Encased in a piece of amber, this tiny bird once lived alongside dinosaurs.

The incredible 'game-changing' bird fossil has been discovered trapped in tree sap in Myanmar's Hukawng Valley, a region that is known for its amber deposits.

Dr. Xing Lida, who discovered the fossil, claimed the five-centimetre-long (2.4-inch-long) specimen is the most complete fossilised bird that has been found inside amber from the Cretaceous Period.

Read more: 

Not so cold duck? Man keeps looking for bird thought extinct

AP Science Writer

OCTOBER 23, 2017 8:34 AM

WASHINGTON 

Hope is the thing with feathers, poet Emily Dickinson wrote. For Richard Thorns, the feathers are pink.

Thorns' hope? To prove that a colorful duck is not extinct. This week, he launches a seventh expedition into the inaccessible wilds of Myanmar to search for the pink-headed duck that hasn't been seen alive since 1949, and that was in India. No one has seen the bird alive in Myanmar in more than a century.

Thorns, a British writer who quit his shop clerk job 20 years ago after reading about the pink-headed duck in the book "Vanishing Birds," has spent $20,000 of his own money on previous fruitless trips. His birder brother called him mad.

"I could have had a lot of nice things," the 53-year-old said. "I don't want nice things. I want to see a pink-headed duck."

This time, he is backed by the Global Wildlife Conservation group, which launched a hunt for "lost species " — 25 quirky and elusive plants and animals beginning with the duck. A sports optic company and cheesemaking company are also helping pay.

Thorns and three others plan to head to the wetlands north of the vast Indawgyi Lake during the rainy season where they believe they have a better chance of spotting the duck. And Thorn thinks he has a secret weapon: elephants.

He used canoes in the past and thinks he probably spooked the shy birds. Now he plans to bring elephants stomping through the wetlands.

"Clearly a bird isn't going to hunker down if there are 2-ton elephants," said Thorn.

As crazy as it may seem, Thorns may be onto something, said ornithologist Kevin McGowan at Cornell University who isn't part of the expedition.

"Fairly regularly birds get rediscovered," says McGowan, who has gone on unsuccessful expeditions for the ivory-billed woodpecker. "We don't see all the world that is in front of our eyes."

Read on 

In Search of the Elusive Pink-Headed Duck

After years of trying, one man thinks he will finally find a bird long thought to be extinct.
by Sarah Laskow
 

June 01, 2017

More than a century ago, in the wetlands around Kolkata, India, there lived a shy type of duck with a bright pink head. It was named, appropriately, the pink-headed duck. The males of the species had rosy pink bills and pink plumage covering their heads and necks. Some of them had light, blush-colored feathers; others were as bright as Pepto-Bismol. They were never particularly common, but hunters spotted them and on occasion bagged them while hunting bigger game. One of the last times anyone saw a pink-headed duck in the wild, it was in the mouth of a hunting dog, who delivered its carcass to Charles M. Inglis, curator of the Darjeeling museum, outside the Indian city of Darbhanga in June 1935.

Officially, the pink-headed duck is listed as critically endangered. The last confirmed sighting in the wild was in 1949. Though there have been reports of pink-headed ducks here and there in the decades since, many people now believe the birds are not just rare and shy, but extinct.

Richard Thorns is not among them. For years now, he has been searching for the pink-headed duck, and, since 2009, he has traveled six times to Myanmar, where he believes a flock of about 50 birds might live. Thorns, an enthusiastic, 53-year-old Englishman whose look can range from scholarly nerd to rugged adventurer, first learned about the pink-headed duck around 1997, from a library book on vanishing birds. At the time, he was working as a shop assistant. As he read about these stunning, rare birds, and the elephant grasses and lotus flowers that they lived among, he had a realization. “I didn’t want to be a shop assistant anymore,” he says. “I decided to look for the pink-headed duck. So I did, and I’ve been after it ever since.”

continued

99 Million-Year-Old Baby Bird Trapped in Amber Discovered in Myanmar

By Hannah Osborne On 6/8/17 at 10:11 AM

Researchers in Myanmar have discovered a 99 million-year-old baby bird encased in amber. The ancient hatchling died when it was just a few days or weeks old after a blob of sticky tree resin fell on it, leaving half of its body frozen in time.

Xing Lida, from the China University of Geosciences, led an international team of researchers in analyzing the three-inch specimen. Their study, published in the journal Gondwana Research, will help scientists better understand the toothed birds that lived alongside dinosaurs—and how they differ from birds living today.

The amber encases the bird’s skull, neck, a partial wing, a hind limb and one foot. The hatchling would have belonged to a group of birds called enantiornithines, that lived during the Cretaceous period, 145 to 65 million years ago. They died out during the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.

The National Geographic Society’s Expeditions Council partly funded the research. The fossil was mined from the Hukawng Valley in northern Myanmar.

Scientists discovered the bird was unusual in several ways—the structure of its wings was very similar to those seen in modern flying birds—but it retained some features that are seen in more primitive theropods, the group of dinosaurs from which modern birds emerged.

Chen Guang, curator of a museum in Yunnan and owner of the specimen, told Xinhua : "Many people thought it was a lizard. But the scales, thread-like feathers and sharp claws on the feet were so noticeable that I thought they must belong to a bird.”


Continued

'Extinct' bird rediscovered: Last seen in 1941

Date:

March 5, 2015

Source:

Wildlife Conservation Society

A scientific team has rediscovered a bird previously thought to be extinct. Jerdon's babbler (Chrysomma altirostre) had not been seen in Myanmar since July 1941, where it was last found in grasslands near the town of Myitkyo, Bago Region near the Sittaung River.

The rediscovery was described in the recently published issue of Birding Asia, the magazine of the Oriental Bird Club.

The team found the bird on 30 May 2014 while surveying a site around an abandoned agricultural station that still contained some grassland habitat. After hearing the bird's distinct call, the scientists played back a recording and were rewarded with the sighting of an adult Jerdon's babbler. Over the next 48 hours, the team repeatedly found Jerdon's babblers at several locations in the immediate vicinity and managed to obtain blood samples and high-quality photographs.

Continued ...

Rare bird species found in northern Myanmar

A sedge of rare sarus cranes has been discovered in the wetlands that surround Kachin State’s Indawgyi Lake.

A press statement released on June 22 by the British-based biodiversity and conservation group, Fauna and Flora International, said they first made the discovery of the distinctive red-headed bird in December 2013.

“First we just saw their charismatic red heads sticking out of the tall green grass but through our telescopes we soon spotted the amazing number of nine individuals,” said Ko Ngwe Lwin, FFI’s project manager at Indawgyi Lake.

FFI said the species is the tallest of the flying birds, measuring up to 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) in height and is occasionally spotted in Rakhine State and the Ayeyarwady Delta, but is rarely seen in such numbers in northern Myanmar.

Continued