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Dinosaur feathers and mammalian hairs found in two sites in the province of Teruel have provided new keys to the conservation of vertebrates in amber.

The remains belong to the Lower Cretaceous, with an age of between 105 and 110 million years, whose description and interpretation have been published in the journal

Scientific Reports

.

The origin of the two pieces is found in resin produced in an aerial environment in that period of time.

One of them was found in the world-famous amber deposit of San Just, in the Teruel municipality of Utrillas, and the other in Ariño, when in the summer of 2019 an excavation was carried out to extract amber in the Santa María mine.

The new dinosaurs Proa valdearinnoensis and Europelta carbonensis had already been found in this mine, but there was nothing to suggest then that the remains of vertebrates included in amber could also be found there.

The piece from the San Just site includes several

remains of dinosaur feathers

scattered on the convex surface of the amber.

Piece of amber from the Teruel Ariño site with a tuft of three mammalian hairs.

It is the oldest known find of amber hair.

Ariño's has three mammalian hairs, with their characteristic microscopic pattern of

scales on the surface,

which represent the oldest known find of amber hairs.

A small lock of hair

The parallel arrangement of the three hairs and their similar proportions allow them to be identified as belonging to a small tuft.

According to experts, determining the species to which these fossils belong "is very complicated", but it is likely that the feather remains correspond to a bird of the extinct group Enantiornithes, and the surface pattern of hair scales is similar to that of of some current mammals.

Both findings have their origin in the same preservation process, known only in resins, which the researchers describe for the first time in the new publication.

This process has been called

pull off vestiture

and consists of trapping small portions of plumage or fur from a living individual, after being in contact with a sticky resin mass for the time necessary for it to be produced. a certain hardening of the resin.

The dinosaur and mammal were most likely in contact with resin while resting or sleeping in or near a tree.

With the subsequent movement of the animal, the resin tore off these small epidermal structures.

The research team that has described said remains in amber is made up of Sergio Álvarez Parra, Xavier Delclòs (both from the University of Barcelona), Mónica M. Solórzano Kraemer (Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Frankfurt am Main), Luis Alcalá (Foundation Teruel-Dinópolis Paleontological Complex) and Enrique Peñalver (Geological and Mining Institute of Spain).

Three of the authors had already observed a similar, though not identical, process during their experiments in the forests of Madagascar, where resin trees grow.

However, they did not see it in the resin itself, but in sticky traps they had installed in resin trees to understand how, millions of years ago, the resin trapped insects and spiders.

These traps also retain hairs from mammals that come into contact with them.

The characteristic of the "pull off vestiture" process is the need for a certain time to elapse between the animal's contact with the resin and the removal of its clothing.

The two pieces of amber in this study are deposited in the Aragonese Museum of Paleontology (Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis) and both add even more value to the extensive fossil record of the province of Teruel.

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