The New York Times’ Trilobites column has an interesting story about four-winged birds. A new paper in the journal Nature Communications describes a new Microraptorinae, Norellraptor barsboldi, named for the late paleontologist Mark Norell. This new animal lived about 121 million years ago in what is now northeastern China.

More than 120 million years ago, a small creature soared across the Cretaceous skies above China. Was it a bird or a pterosaur or … a four-winged raptor?

Researchers recently examined a remarkably well-preserved skeleton of such a dinosaur — it sported sharp claws, a mouthful of teeth and twice the number of wings expected for an avian relative.

The newly identified species, about the size of a crow, sheds light on how other groups of flying dinosaurs achieved liftoff alongside the ancestors of living birds.

Scientists have long debated the evolutionary runway that took dinosaurs into the skies. In 2020, researchers constructed a tree of early birds and closely related dinosaurs, and concluded that flight evolved at least three times, indicating that aerial behavior was most likely more widespread in dinosaurs than previously thought.