Some 99 million years ago, a juvenile dinosaur got its feathery tail stuck in tree resin, a death trap for the small creature.
But its misfortune is now giving scientists unique insight into feathered dinosaurs that prospered during the Cretaceous Period.
Researchers found on Thursday that a chunk of amber spotted by a Chinese scientist in a market in Myanmar last year contained 1.4 inches (3.6 cm) of a dinosaur tail, complete with bones, flesh, skin and feathers.
The dinosaur itself was no more than 6 inches (15 cm) long, about the size of a sparrow.
"This is the first of its kind," said paleontologist Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada.
"I am blown away."
The scientists suspect the tail belonged to a type of two-legged, bird-like dinosaur called a maniraptoran, one of several groups of dinosaurs that possessed feathers.
Birds, which first appeared about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, evolved from small, feathered dinosaurs.
Researchers used sophisticated scanning and microscopic observations to study the tail and determined it boasted a chestnut-brown upper surface, with a pale or white underside, a pattern known as countershading.
"We're seeing feathers still attached to the tail, and we can see how they attach, the shapes that they have down to the micrometre scale, and things like pigment patterns within the feathers," McKellar said.
The discovery also sheds light on the evolution of feathers with the ones trapped in the amber more primitive, lacking much of the central shaft seen in bird feathers.
Amber has long been a boon to paleontologists with a number of animals been found entombed in amber, including insects, lizards, amphibians, mammals and birds, as well as plants including flowers.
