World’s smallest dinosaur is probably a lizard

World’s smallest dinosaur is probably a lizard

Farewell, teeny tiny dinosaur

A diminutive bird-like skull, exquisitely preserved in amber for almost 100 million years, did not belong to the smallest dinosaur ever discovered. It was probably a lizard. In March, I told you the skull might offer a whole new lineage of birds, but yesterday the paper was retracted. “I agree we were wrong and an unpublished specimen will eventually prove it,” palaeontologist and study author Jingmai O’Connor told Retraction Watch, though she disagreed with the choice to retract the paper.

Nature | 3 min readReference: Nature paper (retracted) & bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)