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More than 160 million years ago, the Jurassic sky was filled with winged creatures.
Some of these leaflets may have feathers (just like some of their fellow countrymen on the ground, such as baby T. rexes). But a new discovery suggests that at least one dinosaur in flight was boasting leather over a feather, diving into the air over modern China with wings resembling those of any other country. a bat.
In a recent study published in the journal Nature, scientists described the discovery of a flying dinosaur dating back 163 million years, the size of an urban pigeon.
"This fossil seals the agreement – there were really bat-winged dinosaurs," said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist from Edinburgh University, who was not involved in the study, according to Science magazine.
Jingmai O 'Connor, co-author of the new study, told the New York Times that the creature had probably hovered in the air, "halfway between a flying squirrel and a bat."
Skin flaps stretched between the bones helped this dinosaur to fly
The authors of the study named the new fossil Ambopteryx longibrachium; the first word means "two wings", while the second means "long arm".
"You could have taken it in your hand," said O & # 39; Connor to Science. "It would have been this tiny, bizarre, sawtooth thing, one of a kind today."
Read more: A small dinosaur parent called the "Antarctic King" was discovered at the South Pole
O & # 39; Connor added that she and her colleagues thought Ambopetryx males may have had long ornamental feathers to attract females. The dinosaur probably also had a layer of peach down, but these feathers would have been too small to be used in flight.
Bat-shaped wings, however, were the most surprising feature of the dinosaur.
As a general rule, birds generate the lift they need to take off and stay in flight by flapping feathered wings. The layered feathers form a curved surface called the airfoil that the moving air pushes upwards, thus helping the bird to fly.
On the other hand, the aerodynamic profiles of bats are formed of skin flaps that extend between the bones of the animal's arm. The circulation of air under and around these membranous flaps of the skin generates the lift. A similar structure was found on the wings of extinct pterosaurs (flying reptiles cousins of dinosaurs).
Fossil evidence shows that the newly discovered flying dinosaur had forearms elongated in the same way, with skin flaps covering the empty spaces between the bones. The skin was held in place by a cartilage rod at the wrist of the animal called styliform.
It's a bird … It's a bat … It's a flying dinosaur
The birds and bats evolved separately, and each group of animals used a different wing type to fly.
Paleontologists were convinced that some dinosaurs could also fly – some dinosaur groups later became the ancestors of modern birds – but they did not know how prehistoric creatures acquired this ability.
Then in 2015, scientists unearthed a dinosaur named Yi qi (meaning "strange wing" in Mandarin) in northwestern China. It was almost as small as the newly discovered Ambopteryxand sported similar flaps of skin stretched between the forearms and the torso. But the fossil was too poorly preserved for palaeontologists to determine if Yi qi could fly like a bat. Researchers have classified it as a type of tiny Therapod dinosaur (the same family as the T. rex belonged to) who spent most of his time climbing and sliding between trees.
Now, Ambopteryx provides evidence that the bat-shaped wings of these Jurassic dinos allowed them to fly, at least partially.
However, no such dinosaurs lived after the end of the Jurassic period 145 million years ago. For O & # 39; Connor, this indicates that AmbopteryxThe evolving flight strategy of the flight was not as successful as the feathers of the ancestors of birds. For this reason, the authors of the study concluded that these bat-shaped wings "probably represent an ephemeral experiment" of flight behavior in dinosaurs.
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