In the summer of 2015, Dr. Lita Xing, a Chinese paleontologist from the China University of Geosciences,

went to Myanmar to look for fossils, specifically animal fossils trapped in amber.

There's a big market for amber in Myanmar.

The rich deposits there date to about 100 million years ago. Amber is mined and sold in

local markets, and a lot of it ends up as jewelry. Dr. Xing was perusing one of these markets one

day when he came across a small chunk of amber that seemed to have something unusual inside.

To the untrained eye, the fuzzy thing suspended in

the amber might look like a fossilized piece of a fern or other type of plant. But Dr. Xing

has a trained eye. He recognized that the amber actually contained fossilized feathers.

After careful analysis back at the lab, Dr. Xing discovered that the feathers are attached

to a tiny tail.

There are at least eight tail vertebrae.

But this isn't the tail of a bird.

It belongs to a young sealosaur, a type of small theropod dinosaur.

It lived about 99 million years ago.

This was a super-exciting, groundbreaking discovery, because it provided the first direct evidence of feathers attached to a dinosaur tail preserved in amber.

There are many other fossils of dinosaurs with feathers, but in those fossils,

evidence of feathers is left behind mostly as impressions in stone. In this chunk of amber that Dr.

Sching discovered, we can actually see the feathers themselves frozen in time inside the glass-like

substance. The feathers are primitive, each with a loose structure somewhere between a down feather and a contour feather.

They were more for insulation or display rather than for flight.

This amazing discovery in 2015 added significant insight into the evolution of feathers and

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