By Tim Binnall
A tiny creature that had been declared the world's smallest dinosaur has lost that lofty distinction after a new study of the animal revealed that it is actually just a strange little lizard. Scientists studying the skull of the ancient animal, which had been preserved in amber 99 million years ago, made headlines last year when they seemingly identified it as a hummingbird-like dinosaur that was believed to be the smallest such creature of its kind ever found. However, the subsequent discovery of a similar-looking animal reportedly led researchers to reclassify the creature when they determined that it was, in fact, a very weird lizard.
By way of CT scans of the two specimens, experts were able to closely examine the creatures and found that they possessed characteristics that indicated their true lizard nature. Specifically, they cited the presence of scales as well as the way in which the animals' teeth were rooted in the skull in a manner unlike that of the dinosaurs. Additionally, they pointed to "a hockey stick-shaped skull bone that is universally shared among scaled reptiles." As such, they concluded that the initial specimen had, in fact, been incorrectly classified as a bird-like dinosaur when it was a lizard all along.
As for how the creature could have been mistaken for a bird, they theorized that its skull had become deformed by the amber that encased it. "Imagine taking a lizard and pinching its nose into a triangular shape," study co-author Edward Stanley explained, "it would look a lot more like a bird." While the animal may no longer be the world's smallest dinosaur, researchers stressed that the reclassification of the creature doesn't make it any less spectacular as herpetologist Juan Diego Daza, who worked on the study, marveled that "it's a really weird animal. It's unlike any other lizard we have today."