Palaeontologists in China said on Wednesday they had found the world’s oldest flying fish, a strange, snub-nosed creature that glided over water in a bid to evade predators some 240 million years ago.
Fossils in Chinese museum collections have been dusted off, dated and categorised to reveal that the flying fish is a much older creature than thought, the palaeontologists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
A specimen named Potanichthys xingyiensis lived in the Middle Triassic period between 235 million and 242 million years ago and is up to 27 million years older than the previous record-holder, a species found in Europe, said the study.
The Triassic geological period predated the Jurassic some 200 million to 150 million years ago, when dinosaurs thrived.
P. xingyiensis presents “the earliest evidence of over-water gliding in vertebrates”, said co-author Xu Guanghui, of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in China.
It was already gliding some 80 million years before the emergence of birds, which are thought to be the descendants of small feathery dinosaurs.