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Palaeontology

Dinosaur up in the air

Nature volume 521, pages 40–41 (2015)Cite this article

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A new feathered dinosaur from China, belonging to an obscure and strange carnivorous group, bears a seemingly bony wrist structure that may have had a role in flight. See Letter p.70

When the first dinosaurs with feathers or feather-like structures were brought to light by Chinese scientists in the mid-1990s, they cemented the hypothesis of the dinosaurian origin of birds and provided spectacular evidence about the origin of flight and the primordial functions of feathers1,2. In the ensuing two decades, the picture of the evolution of feathers and flight has become richer and more complicated as other feathered dinosaurs have been discovered, seemingly on a monthly basis3. But things have just gone from the strange to the bizarre. On page 70 of this issue, Xu et al.4 present a feathered dinosaur from a completely unexpected branch of the dinosaur tree — and it sports a never-before-seen skeletal element that the authors think may be related to flight.

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Figure 1: The three known members of the Scansoriopterygidae.

Lida Xing

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kevin Padian is in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.,

    Kevin Padian

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  1. Kevin Padian
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Correspondence to Kevin Padian.

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Padian, K. Dinosaur up in the air. Nature 521, 40–41 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14392

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