Yi qi. Credit: Dinostar Co. Ltd

The week’s episode of the CBC’s Quirks & Quarks has a segment on a very strange new dinosaur from China.  The animal is named Yi qi, pronounced “ee chee”), which comes from Mandarin for “strange wing”.  The fossil dates to the late Jurassic about 160 million years ago.  Original paper in the journal Nature.

Canadian paleontologist Dr. Corwin Sullivan calls it the strangest specimen he’s ever seen. He and a team of Chinese colleagues have determined that a small, bipedal, dinosaur fossil, dating back 160 million years, had a bat-like membrane wing, which means dinosaurs evolved flying twice.

Dinosaurs evolved feathers, which they then used to build wings and develop flight, and that lineage survives today as birds. But this unique new fossil suggests that a closely related line of dinosaurs experimented with a completely different way to build a wing – one more similar to pterosaurs and bats.

Dr. Sullivan, who is an associate professor at the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, says the fossil is not complete enough to understand how well it might have flown, but he suspects it wasn’t a great flyer, which might be one reason why the lineage didn’t survive.