Oculudentavis is an extinct genus of lizard of uncertain taxonomic placement,[1] originally identified as an avialan dinosaur (bird, in the broad sense).

[4] Oculudentavis khaungraae is known from a complete skull preserved in Burmese amber, found at the Angbamo site in Tanai Township, Kachin State, northern Myanmar.

It may have had a relatively strong bite and a specialized diet of small invertebrates, based on its sharp teeth, extensively textured mouth skin, tall coronoid process, and robust, inflexible skull.

A phylogenetic analysis in the original description supports a basal placement for Oculudentavis within Avialae, only slightly closer to modern birds than Archaeopteryx.

The editors of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology's Fanpu publication have published an editorial arguing for an interpretation of Oculudentavis as a lizard rather than an avialan.

Within the squamates, analyses with a more detailed dataset variously recovered Oculudentavis as the sister group of (1) the Dibamidae, (2) Scandensia, and (3) Mosasauria, depending on whether multi-state characteristics were treated as (1) ordered or (2) unordered or if (3) molecular data was removed.

[11] A recent paleomagnetic reconstruction finds that the Burma terrane formed an island land mass in the Tethys Ocean during the Mid Creaceous at a latitude around 5-10 degrees south of the equator.

[13] Zircons in the tuffs of the formation in which the Burmese amber has been found have been U-Pb dated to 98.8 ± 0.6 Ma, or the Cenomanian epoch of the earliest Late Cretaceous.

[13][16] Upon the high-profile release of the paper, which was featured on the front cover of Nature, several palaeontologists renewed discussion around controversies related to Burmese amber, which were first raised in 2019.

These include poor working conditions for miners (many of whom are underage), and allegations that the high-end trade of Burmese amber helps to fund the Kachin conflict, akin to blood diamonds.

[17][3][18] As of April 2020, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology has discouraged its members from collecting and studying Burmese amber due to the connections between the resource and human rights abuse.

The decision of the authors to assume that Oculudentavis is a bird a priori, without testing other possible positions, for their morphological description and phylogenetic analysis also was called "illogical" by Wang et al., who noted that the rejection of this hypothesis would compromise the paper's conclusions and significance.