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Nature 421, 335-340 (23 January 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature01342; Received 5 August 2002; Accepted 29 November 2002

There is a Brief Communications Arising (17 November 2005) associated with this document.

Four-winged dinosaurs from China

Xing Xu1, Zhonghe Zhou1, Xiaolin Wang1, Xuewen Kuang2, Fucheng Zhang1 & Xiangke Du3

  1. Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 643, Beijing 100044, China
  2. Tianjin Museum of Natural History, Tianjin 300074, China
  3. Radiological Department, People's Hospital, Beijing University, Beijing 100044, China

Correspondence to: Xing Xu1 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to X.X. (e-mail: Email: xing_xu@sina.com).

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Although the dinosaurian hypothesis of bird origins is widely accepted, debate remains about how the ancestor of birds first learned to fly. Here we provide new evidence suggesting that basal dromaeosaurid dinosaurs were four-winged animals and probably could glide, representing an intermediate stage towards the active, flapping-flight stage. The new discovery conforms to the predictions of early hypotheses that proavians passed through a tetrapteryx stage.