Five days ago I wrote about the new Nature paper revealing the “dino-bat” fossil Yi qi, a bizarre species of theropod that had feathers but also membranous wings like a bat—and a special new bone, evolved from the wrist, that supported its wing. It isn’t clear whether this creature could fly, but it surely could at least glide. At any rate, Nature has put out a two-minute video about the beast, and here it is. (If you didn’t read the post, this can serve as a precis.)
I don’t like the slur on pigeons at the end, for, in parts of the world, pigeons are the most common dinosaurs.
h/t: Heather Hastie
Most of the life restorations I’ve seen of this animal take the authors’ suggestion of attaching the membranes to the flank or armpit… but that kind of configuration has no living correlate and I personally think a bat-like attachment further down on the body is more realistic (though not necessarily the legs; leg-membrane attachment is rare in gliding animals with membranes and a mobile hip joint [allowing for a sprawling position] has not been established for scansoriopterygids).
Speculative, of course, but here’s my take on this unusual dinosaur: http://emilywilloughby.com/gallery/paleoart/yi-qi
I meant leg attachment is rare in animals with relatively long, seemingly cursorial legs, that is!
Hmm, odd… looks like my correction comment got approved but my original isn’t showing up. I said:
Most of the life restorations I’ve seen of this animal so far take the authors’ suggestions of the membrane attaching to the flank or the armpit, but there is no extant correlate of that kind of membrane wing configuration. I also can’t really get behind a leg-attachment point for the membrane when the legs are so long and seemingly cursorial in other scansoriopterygids, and a mobile hip joint (to enable a sprawling posture for gliding) hasn’t been established for scansors.
As such, here’s my take on the life appearance of this bizarre critter: http://emilywilloughby.com/gallery/paleoart/yi-qi
And it shows up as soon as I post again. Oy.
That will happen to me sometimes. I learn that if a comment I make does not appear to hit reload, sometimes more than once.
There is something flakey going on today, my previous post was meant to be a reply to your pic Emily.
That is amazing! I love how dynamic you made the leap. Really brings this dinosaur to life. 🙂
Talking to #4, by the way, and the linked picture.
Fabulous pic Emily. I would have thought it would make sense to place the “extra bony bit of arm” wherever was most aerodynamically sound, and to give the animal as much wing space as defensible.
You have obviously read a lot more on this. So it is unlikely the membrane would go to the back legs like we see in the Calugo?
Or maybe the back legs were like wings, as was seen in some of the other flying/gliding dinos. Long back legs would be a bonus for either of these designs.
Great illustration, btw!
Thanks! It’s not necessarily unlikely, but there’s not much to go on so far–the back half of the animal did not preserve in this specimen, so we don’t know what its legs and tail were doing. Some people are saying that Yi is an ontogenic stage of Epidexipteryx, which would implicate the long legs, short tail, and long retrices shown by the authors in the paper. But very long legs in currently known membrane-winged animals is quite rare. Flying squirrels, bats and pterosaurs all have comparatively short legs which attach to membranes. Colugos have somewhat longer legs but highly mobile hip joints, an uncommon condition in most maniraptorans, which tend to have stiff, relatively inflexible trunks and pelvises.
The bottom line is that we just don’t know yet–we need some reanalyses of existing scansor specimens to check for ontogeny, trace of membranes, and unusual joint mobility!
Fascinating work, Emily, and such a beautiful & exciting illustration!
This find really underscores the diversity of life. We will probably never know the full diversity of species back then. Still less its complexity; we are, I think, too often conditioned (even implicitly) to suppose that earlier forms are somehow ‘less advanced’ or ‘primitive’. After a certain point, long since reached by the dinosaurs, the actual word we need is ‘different’.
Very cool. This is going into one of my course websites.
Surely they can get some indication of whether the animal could flap by its chest. The presence or absence of the necessary muscle attachments would be pretty indicative I would have thought.
There does not appear to be any evidence for the sort of pectoral muscles needed for powered flight, but the specimen is also quite crushed and distorted, so it’s hard to know for sure.
I suppose that was a slur on pigeons. Funny to see it phrased that way.
Perhaps the narrator had a job cleaning pigeon s**t off statues in the middle of London as a student or something. That might put you off them a bit.
Well, thanks for the nightmares, Mother Nature.
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Also, here’s a short clip that demonstrates how dinosaurs evolved into birds. https://youtu.be/stCFO_nb2bk
A Friend of mine keeps Racing Pigeons and the differenc in appearance between them and the everyday bird is similar to the difference between a Ferrarri and a banged up old Ford.
Not having numbers to hand, but there’s a fair chance that the commonest dinosaur in the world since the demise of the passenger pigeon is the domesticated chicken. Britain alone probably goes through over a billion a year, implying a breeding population of hundreds of millions.