PhysOrg reports on the discovery of a prehistoric predator who puts the terrifying dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to shame … a Chinese cousin of velociraptor who hunted the ancestors of modern birds by flying after them with four feathery “wings”:
The new species, Jian changmaensis, belongs to a clade within the dromaeosaur family called microraptors. Microraptors tend to be small; the most well-known species is about the size of a crow. “Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found,” says [study author Jingmai] O’Connor [of the Field Museum in Chicago]. “The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot wingspan, around the size of a barn owl.”
And while scientists only have Jian’s arm, they suspect that Jian, like its fellow microraptors, had long feathers on both its arms and its legs, giving it the appearance of having four “wings” that it used to glide. “Jian and the other microraptors probably weren’t capable of true, powered flight, but they could probably glide like a flying squirrel,” says O’Connor.
The new dinosaur’s name, Jian changmaensis, is a reference to its bird-like appearance and its place of origin. Jian is a winged creature in Chinese mythology, and the fossil was found in the Changma Basin in China’s Gansu province.
“Jian changmaensis reveals that non-avian dinosaurs lived in what is now the Changma Basin, an area famous for its fossil birds,” says Matt Lamanna, corresponding author of the study and Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Mary R. Dawson Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and senior dinosaur researcher. “Our team has recovered more than a hundred bird fossils at Changma, but only this single non-avian dinosaur specimen. Jian provides critical new insight into the biological history of the Changma region and the ecological context of the ancestors of today’s birds.”
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You can read more about this prehistoric predator here, in Annals of Carnegie Museum (pdf).