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.