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

Smart as a bird: Flying robot avoids obstacles

November 1, 2012 by Bill Steele  

Cornell researchers have created an autonomous flying robot that is as smart as a bird when it comes to maneuvering around obstacles. Able to guide itself through forests, tunnels or damaged buildings, the machine could have tremendous value in search-and-rescue operations. Small flying machines are already common, and GPS technology provides guidance. Now, Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science, and his team are tackling the hard part: how to keep the vehicle from slamming into walls and tree branches. Human controllers can't always react swiftly enough, and radio signals may not reach everywhere the robot goes. The test vehicle is a quadrotor, a commercially available flying machine about the size of a card table with four helicopter rotors. Saxena and his team have already programmed quadrotors to navigate hallways and stairwells. But in the wild, current methods aren't accurate enough at large distances to plan a route around obstacles. Saxena is building on methods he previously developed to turn a flat video camera image into a 3-D model of the environment using such cues as converging straight lines, the apparent size of familiar objects and what objects are in front of or behind each other—the same cues humans unconsciously use to supplement their stereoscopic vision.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-11-smart-bird-robot-obstacles.html#jCp