# Fossil Fails: The tiny dino with a massive flaw

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611/fossil-fails-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw.md
Podcast: [The Fossil Files](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611)
Published: 2025-10-07T07:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://a94020de-22e2-432b-af22-019fdb3026ee.libsyn.com/fossil-fails-2-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/a94020de-22e2-432b-af22-019fdb3026ee/Episode_11_Oculudentavis.mp3?dest-id=5062010
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-fossil-files-7375611/episodes/fossil-fails-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw
Duration seconds: 2640

## Resource

Discovery of the smallest ever dinosaur acheived quite a splash when it was publised on the front cover of Nature in 2020. The new critter, Oculodentavis , was the size of a hummingbird and reconstructed as close to Archaeopteryx on the lineage to birds. In this episode, Susie and Rob take a look at how this story quickly started to unravel as it turned out Oculodentavis might been something else altogether. This how episode also shed some light on a dark underbelly of an ethical problem for palaeontologists - what if your fossils are coming from a war zone and potentially funding ethic violence? The main paper discussed this week is by Lida Xing and Jingmai O'Connor and colleagues "Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar" published in Nature in 2020, now retracted ( https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2068-4 ) . A brief accessible summary of what happened afterwards can be found here by Krister Smith in Current Biology "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Oculudentavis !" ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.017 ) . A summary of the situation with Myanmar amber fossils including discussion of the paper by Emma Dunne and colleagues can be found in Science " Violent conflict in Myanmar linked to boom in fossil amber research, study claims " by Rodrigo Pérez Ortega (doi: 10.1126/science.adf0973) Wide screen palaeoart by Stephanie Abramowicz .

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