Strange tale of tiny bristly dinosaur with bat wings
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SCIENTISTS in China this week described one of the weirdest flying creatures ever discovered, a pigeon-size dinosaur with wings like a bat that lived not long before the first birds.
The dinosaur, named Qi Yi — meaning “strange wing” in Mandarin — lived about 160 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, about 10 million years before the earliest-known bird, Archaeopteryx.
It is considered a cousin of birds, but boasted membranous wings made of skin like those of flying reptiles known as pterosaurs, which lived at the same time, and bats, which appeared more than 100 million years later, instead of the stiff, plume-like feathers of birds.
Each wing was supported by a clawed, three-fingered hand and a rod-like bone extending from the wrist. One of the fingers was much longer than the others. Feathers preserved around its head, neck and limbs are more similar to hairs or bristles than to bird flight feathers.
“It’s hard to imagine that it could have flapped very effectively, since the rod-like bone was presumably a fairly unwieldy thing to have attached to the wrist,” said paleontologist Corwin Sullivan of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
“So our guess would be that Qi Yi was gliding or maybe combining gliding with some relatively inefficient flapping.”
Finding a dinosaur with membranous wings was “quite amazing and unexpected,” Sullivan said. “Qi Yi illustrates the flight-related evolutionary tinkering that was going on.”
Patches of the membranous wing tissue were preserved in the fossil found in Hebei Province by a farmer, but the overall wing shape remains uncertain.
The dinosaur probably lived in trees and used peg-like teeth to munch lizards, mammals and insects, and perhaps fruit.
“This guy is not far from the first birds, in fact,” said paleontologist Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Linyi University. “It belongs to a bizarre dinosaur group called the scansoriopterygids, closely related to primitive birds.”
The research appears in the journal Nature.
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