The smallest dinosaur?

OCCASIONALLY, A FOSSIL turns up that reminds people of how little is really known about the past. This, perhaps, is such a discovery. It is the skull, a mere 7mm long, of a tiny, yet full-grown dinosaur, preserved in amber from a deposit in northern Myanmar which is 99m years old. That dates it to the middle of the Cretaceous, more than 30m years before this period’s more famous dinosaurian denizens, , and , bestrode what is now North America.Extrapolating from its skull, would have been about the size of a bee hummingbird, the smallest bird now alive. And—confusingly to modern sensibilities, which are used to thinking of “dinosaurs” and “birds” as separate categories—it was a bird, too. It belonged to a group called the Enantiornithes, which were similar to modern birds, the Neornithes, except that evolution did not deprive them of either their teeth or the claws on their forelimbs, even though those forelimbs were fully functional wings.