This 100-Million-Year-Old Bird Trapped in Amber Is The Best We've Ever Seen

Unfortunately, while it looks almost good as new, sitting in that amber, the bird's flesh will have likely broken down into pure carbon, which means its DNA is probably long gone. But what we can glean from this specimen is the fact that it was probably a member of the so-called opposite birds, or Enantiornithes - a group of prehistoric birds, thought to have evolved at the same time as the ancestors of modern birds, but for some reason died off with the non-avian dinosaurs. "In appearance, opposite birds likely resembled modern birds, but they had a socket-and-ball joint in their shoulders where modern birds have a ball-and-socket joint - hence the name," Michael Le Page reports for New Scientist. "They also had claws on their wings, and jaws and teeth rather than beaks - but at the time the hatchling lived, the ancestors of modern birds had not yet evolved beaks either.