Miami Herald (Sunday)

Winged dinosaur jumped among trees like hang glider

- BY SABRINA IMBLER New York Times

During a blip in time in the late Jurassic, a dinosaur that weighed no more than a chinchilla flung itself from tree to tree, spread its wings and tried to soar. In theory, it sounds beautiful — an early attempt at flight before birds figured out the blueprint.

In practice, it was chaotic.

The dinosaur, Yi qi, only barely managed to glide, stretching out and shimmying its skin-flap, downyfeath­ered wings in a valiant attempt at flying. “It was rocketing from tree to tree, desperatel­y trying not to slam into something,” said Alex Dececchi, a paleontolo­gist at Mount Marty

University in South Dakota. “It wouldn’t be something pleasant.”

Unsurprisi­ngly, Yi qi is not an ancestor of modern birds. It went extinct after just a few million years, presumably doomed by its sheer lack of competency in the air. In a study published Oct. 22 in the journal iScience, Dececchi and other researcher­s analyzed how Yi qi and the dinosaur Ambopteryx could have flown. Both animals were scansoriop­terygids, a littleknow­n group of small dinosaurs. The researcher­s did not expect the two to be great flyers, but their results painted a picture of bumbling creatures that weren’t truly at home on the ground, among the trees or in the sky.

Found by a farmer in northeaste­rn China, Yi qi was first described in 2015 by paleontolo­gists Xing Xu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Xiaoting Zheng, of Linyi University. When Dececchi first learned about the dinosaur’s bizarre anatomy, he was taken aback. “I said words that cannot be put into print,” he said.

In addition to the batlike wings, which had never before been observed in a dinosaur, Yi qi had an extraordin­ary long bone jutting out from its wrist. “Like Edward Scissorhan­ds,” said Michael Pittman, a paleontolo­gist at the University of Hong Kong and an author on the paper.

In 2018, Dececchi pre

sented Yi qi in one of his classes as a way of teaching the scientific method: “Here’s a weird creature. How do you think it would fly?” The more he thought about the question, the more he wanted to answer it.

When Dececchi presented a preliminar­y paper on Yi qi at a conference in 2018, he saw a similar paper by Arindam Roy, a graduate student in Pittman’s lab. The scientists decided to collaborat­e, with Pittman reconstruc­ting the dinosaur’s wing and Dececchi modeling its flight. When Ambopteryx was described in 2018, the scientists incorporat­ed the dinosaur into the study.

Pittman’s lab scanned the fossil using a technique called laser-stimulated fluorescen­ce to detect soft tissues that might have gone unnoticed when the Yi qi was first described. The laser technique revealed new soft tissues around the neck and face and provided close-up images of the membrane, which allowed Pittman to revise the model for what Yi qi’s wing might have looked like.

With wing models in hand, Dececchi ran the dinosaurs through a panoply of mathematic­al models to test its flight ability. “I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt: the biggest wings, the most muscles, the fastest flapping,” he said.

The creatures failed even the most generous models. Their pectoral muscles were too weak to achieve flapping flight. They could not sprint fast enough to launch themselves from the ground. They were poor turners.

They could not even take off after running on an incline while furiously flapping their wings.

The only scenario left was a bumbling glide wherein the dinosaurs stretched out their arms like flying squirrels and jumped from tree to tree, clattering among the branches.

Xu, who led the study first describing Yi qi, said he found the new paper’s analysis rigorous, although he was a bit surprised by how poorly the dinosaur seemed to fly. “I don’t consider this a final word on the flight capabiliti­es of Yi,” he said, adding that the discovery of betterpres­erved specimens may produce different results.

“It’s a nice exploratio­n of an odd group,” said Jingmai O’Connor, a curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum who also described Yi qi. “However, the authors seem to be reading too much into a handful of poorly preserved specimens.” She noted that only three adult scansoriop­terygid fossils are known to science.

Yi qi and Ambopteryx’s strategy may have worked in the short term. But as early birds took over the skies, eagle-size pterosaurs leered from above and wolf-size dinosaurs salivated from below, the scansoriop­terygids tumbled into extinction.

 ?? GABRIEL UGUETO NYT ?? An illustrati­on provided by Gabriel Ugueto shows the flight-challenged Ambopteryx, a Jurassic-era dinosaur with inefficien­t wings that allowed it to glide for short distances.
GABRIEL UGUETO NYT An illustrati­on provided by Gabriel Ugueto shows the flight-challenged Ambopteryx, a Jurassic-era dinosaur with inefficien­t wings that allowed it to glide for short distances.

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