BBC NEWS ONLINE: Baby bird fossil is 'rarest of the rare'

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Lead researcher Fabien Knoll of the University of Manchester said analysis of bone development can be used to study a host of evolutionary characteristics.

"New technologies are offering palaeontologists unprecedented capacities to investigate fossils," he said.

The fossil was found many years ago in the famous Las Hoyas site in Spain. However, it has remained largely unstudied until now.

"Truth be told, the techniques we used to analyse it in the paper (such as synchrotron microtomography and elemental mapping) had not yet been developed when the specimen was discovered," said Dr Knoll.