Small Jurassic Dinosaur May Have Flown Without Feathers

Over the last two decades, scientists in China have paraded one surprising dinosaur discovery after another, enough to rewrite textbooks and even impress dinophile first graders. Some of the smaller newfound creatures, it turns out, had feathers, which shifted expert thinking to the dinosaurian origin of birds.

Now a discovery of 160-million-year-old fossils in northeastern China, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, calls attention to a dinosaur species that may have tried to take to the air on featherless wings. It was one of presumably many experiments in early flight that failed the test of time and was eventually abandoned. Scientists are not even sure how it was supposed to work.

After studying findings by a Chinese-led team of paleontologists, Kevin Padian, an American dinosaur authority, said he could only think that the attempted flight innovations "have just gone from the strange to the bizarre."

The fossil remains belonged to a previously unknown species of an obscure group of small dinosaurs, related to primitive birds such as the famous Archaeopteryx. It had feathers, but they seemed too insubstantial to be useful in flight. Then the scientists said they recognized the unusually long rodlike bone extending from each of the two wrists: curving structures possibly supporting an aerodynamic membrane.

Sure enough, patches of membrane tissue were detected along the bone supports. So, the scientists concluded, their specimen must have had wings somewhat like those of bats or flying squirrels. Nothing like this had been found before in dinosaurs.

The research team, led by Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and Zheng Xianoting of Linyi University in Shandong Province, named the specimen Yi qi (pronounced "ee chee"), meaning "strange wing" in Mandarin.