Scientists discovered remarkably preserved dinosaur-era bird wings trapped inside amber for nearly 100,000,000 years, with feathers and tissue still visible
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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10-year-old story, free with no pop-ups here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/bird-wings-amber-1.3655942
That reminds me I should call her
Clone it!
I'm sure there's no possible way that could ever go wrong.
So what are you waiting for? Extract the DNA, and get to cloning. We have a Dinobird Air Force to build!
dinosaur-era bird
So, a dinosaur?
Well, no.
Modern birbs became a proper distinct group around that time (no teeth, modern wing structure, etc).
They cohabited with proper dinosaurs & flew around along with "pterosauromorpha" (flying lizardos). (At the time they didn't have any flying mammals tho.)
And the distinctions come from bone structures & the few feathers that we discovered - so if someone with knowledge would say that feather came from a bird (with features found in modern birds today) and not a dinosaur, I would be inclined to believe them.
Avian dinosaur, but yeah we should totally just call it a dino wing for short.
100 million years spelled out like that gives it a lot more scale of how long ago that is.
And still it doesn't really, considering the exponential scale used for writing down numbers.
The only way that would really give a proper sense of scale is the good old tally list. But with that it would harldy be possible to count up to 100 million.
Nonsense, we can crowd source this. Look, I'll start:
|
||
We could write a bot to do this.
How many bits have been sent over the internet? Probably more than that measly 100 billion.
We only got to three, and someone immediately jumps in and tries to AI the whole thing. This here is our entire problem.
4 lines of python is now AI?
PrintF ("|")
Repeat (printf, 100000000)
What's the problem? 100M digits even in worst case Unicode would be less than 1GiB. Totally doable in the modern world.
And this is the mid-Cretaceous -- as feathered dinosaurs go, Anchiornis was around 60,000,000 years before that, and Kulindadromeus perhaps even earlier.
Forbidden potato chip. No seriously, this is pretty damn cool
5 second rule has long since passed, yes.
Depends on where you start the count from 🤔
Or how broad a time scale we're talking about. On a stellar evolution time scale, it's roughly 5 seconds.
Touché
We need to get a c/ForbiddenSnacks already
Only the pic?
Coooooooooooooooooooool
Poor bird ☹️
Maybe it came from a pillow ...