Bird or bat? New dinosaur find in China is a bit of both and a puzzle of evolution

Chinese scientists have discovered the first dinosaur to have “hybrid” wings combining feathers with a membrane similar to that of bats.

The 160 million year old fossil, found in China’s northern Hebei province and described in the latest issue of the journal Nature, was a small carnivore with sharp teeth and strong jaws.

Named Yi Qi, which means “odd wings”, the fossilised creature could lead to a re-evaluation of how dinosaurs evolved into birds.

Scientists had believed the key was the growth of feathers, but the hybrid wings of Yi suggested the process could have been more sophisticated and chaotic than previously thought.

“We were shocked by the discovery. Never before had any dinosaurs carried a feature like this,” said Xu Xing, professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and one of the authors of the Nature paper.

“Going hybrid is a risky business. Most attempts have ended up in failures, and this was one of them. Mother Nature’s failed experiments rarely got preserved in fossil records because their occurrence was just a blink in the long history of natural evolution,” he said.

The fossil, currently being kept at the Tianyu Museum of Natural History in Shandong province, was different from other dinosaur fossils in that some parts were badly preserved.