A CT scan of the Oculudentavis skull by LI Gang, Oculudentavis means eye-tooth bird, named for its distinctive features. Credit: Lars Schmitz
The newspaper Nature has issued a retraction for an article he posted on March 11th called “Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar.” Editorial staff were alerted to a possible misclassification of the amber-embedded fossil, and after the review agreed with the assessment and issued the retraction.
When the document was released, many mainstream publications were intrigued by the story and wrote about the findings, giving the team from China, the United States and Canada a bit of notoriety. But soon after, others in the field began to question the categorization of the fossil; many suggested that it appeared to be a lizard, which is a different group of dinosaur reptiles.
The specimen in question is a very small skull embedded in amber, believed to be approximately 100 million years old, dating back to the time of the dinosaurs. The researchers described the specimen as a bird-like skull less than two centimeters long, about the size of a hummingbird skull. And his mouth was full of teeth.
Some in the field were so sure it was a lizard and not a dinosaur that they wrote and uploaded a document to the bioRxiv prepress server explaining their concerns. The authors of the article then published a response that addresses their concerns and refutes the skeptics’ arguments. That was followed by another team reporting that they had found a similar fossil and after studying it, they had considered it a lizard. By reviewing both the document and the evidence presented by others in the field, the editors of Nature chose to retract the paper.
The researchers who published the original paper appear to be divided in their assessment of retraction, with some insisting that there was no reason to retract the paper, and others acknowledging that they had made a mistake in classifying their finding as a dinosaur. In any case, all the researchers agree that the work they did on the fossil was valid and, therefore, the document could be used as a source by others in the future: it is only the classification of the finding that has been questioned.
The discovery of the smallest known Mesozoic dinosaur reveals new species in the evolution of birds.
Lida Xing et al. Retraction Note: Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period of Myanmar, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-020-2553-9
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