The Smithsonian has a story about a new "bat-like" dinosaur from China. This animal lived about 160 million years ago in the middle Jurassic. It's called Ambopteryx longibrachium and it's seems to be related to Yi qi, which was described back in 2015. The description of Ambopteryx appeared recently in the jounal Nature.
About 160 million years ago, in the depths of the Jurassic, feathered dinosaurs started to take to the air. Clawed arms that had evolved to snatch and catch began to take on a new aerodynamic role, and feather-coated limbs began flapping as the earliest avian dinosaurs overcame gravity to leave the surface of the Earth behind. But not all fluffy saurians launched into the air the same way. An unexpected discovery from China reveals an enigmatic family of dinosaurs with bat-like wings.
The first of these dinosaurs, given the adorable moniker Yi qi, was described by paleontologist Xing Xu and colleagues in 2015. While the small dinosaur had a coating of fuzz, its wings were primarily made up of a membrane stretched between the fingers and body. The dinosaur’s wings were more like those of bats, which wouldn’t evolve for more than 100 million years, or like the leathery wings of contemporary flying reptiles called pterosaurs.
“I was frozen when I realized that a second membranous winged dinosaur was in front of my eyes,” Wang says. The 163 million-year-old fossil confirms that Yi was not an aberration or a one-off. Together, the two species represent an alternate evolutionary path for airborne dinosaurs.
A delicately preserved skeleton surrounded by a splash of fossilized fuzz, with gut contents still inside the body cavity, Ambopteryx looks very similar to Yi. Both are close relatives within a group of small, fuzzy dinosaurs called scansoriopterygids. Ambopteryx differs from its relative in skeletal features, having a longer forelimb than hindlimb and fused vertebrae at the end of the tail that likely supported long feathers, but both represent a family of bat-like dinosaurs that was previously unknown to experts.
