Dinosaur fossil with bat wings is first of its kind [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By/Michael Casey/CBS News/April 29, 2015, 4:14 PM
Dinosaur fossil with bat wings is first of its kind

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http://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2015/04/29/71342a06-fd17-4a72-84a0-8d91b6da9090/crop/620x584+0+107/4e4d49fd56e1c4cf1e737956ae85e1e0/figure-4.jpg
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Artist's impression of the new dinosaur Yi qi./ Dinostar Co. Ltd.
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A bat-like dinosaur has been unearthed in China that had wings made of skin rather than feathers, showing there may have been different ways of flying before the emergence of birds.

The tiny dinosaur discovered by a local farmer from Jurassic rocks in northeast China has been named Yi qi, which means "strange wing" in Mandarin. It belongs to a group of dinosaurs with long hands called scansoriopterygids that thrived 160 million years ago and so far are known only to be from China. Scansoriopterygids are closely related to small, primitive birds such as the Archaeopteryx, but there was previously no evidence that they could take to the air.

"It highlights how complex the transition from dinosaur to birds is," said Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology, and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, who along with Zheng Xiaoting of Linyi University and several others described the finding in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

"Yi qi lived in the Jurassic, so it was a pioneer in the evolution of flight on the line to birds," Zheng added. "It reminds us that the early history of flight was full of innovations, not all of which survived."

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