Something Strange-Winged This Way Comes

Birds are survivors. After the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, it was an entire lineage of flying dinosaurs that survived, going on to give rise to the avian class.

But non-avian dinosaurs might have had the ability to fly as well, or at least, the ability to glide over long distances. In a paper published Wednesday in Nature, a team of scientists described the latest winged dinosaur to be discovered in China, which they named Yi qi (“strange wing” in Mandarin). More bat and flying squirrel than bird, Yi qi apparently took an independent evolutionary path to flight.

“No other bird or dinosaur has a wing of the same kind,” lead author Xu Xing, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, said in a statement. “We don’t know if Yi qi was flapping or gliding, or both.”

Yi qui was discovered by a farmer in Hebei Province in northeastern China with only its tail and lower body missing. Weighing less than a pound and having a skull only about 1.5 inches long, it belongs to the scansoriopterygids, a little-studied group of dinosaurs with only three known species.

Neither of the other two scansoriopterygids displays the capability to fly. Yet Yi qi has a long rod-like structure—made of bone or perhaps calcified cartilage—extending from each of its two wrists, as well as patches of preserved membrane tissue. Present-day animals with a similar, though not completely identical, structure include bats, flying squirrels, and the greater glider, an Australian marsupial.

Yi qi, which was carnivorous and lived some 160 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, also had feathers on its forelimb, hindlimb, head, and neck, but no flight feathers. The dinosaur shares few qualities with birds, which are believed to have evolved from a different group of carnivorous dinosaurs, the Maniraptora.

Yi qi is not the only non-avian dinosaur that might have been able to fly. In 2000, for example, scientists unearthed the first Microraptor, a four-winged dinosaur, and since then numerous other Microraptor specimens have come to light. Meanwhile, non-avian dinosaurs with feathers—distinct from the feathered ancestors of birds, like Archaeopteryx—have been on scientists' radar since 1996.

“The picture of the evolution of feathers and flight has become richer and more complicated as other feathered dinosaurs have been discovered, seemingly on a monthly basis,” Kevin Padian, a University of California-Berkeley paleontologist who peer reviewed the research, wrote in a commentary for Nature. “But,” he added in reference to Yi qi, “things have just gone from the strange to the bizarre.”