“The specimen was discovered by a local farmer near Lamadong Town (Jianchang County, western Liaoning, China), and donated to the museum of Hebei GEO University in 2023,” the paper says, and the farmer “requested to remain anonymous.” What that person turned in is a new four-winged dinosaur, Norellraptor barsboldi, and its describers think it shows the gear for flight was put together independently in its lineage and in birds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About 30 percent of the new features in its lineage also show up in birds, 57 of them, but they show up in a different order. “These results dismiss a shared developmental pattern driving the evolution of the flying dinosaurs and support multiple and independent selective regimes at the origin of the winged taxa in Paraves,” the authors write (Paraves is birds plus their closest dinosaur cousins).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rui Pei, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who wasn’t involved, put it like this to Live Science<\/a>: “This demonstrates that microraptors acquired traits convergent with the early evolutionary stages of true birds, albeit through a distinct evolutionary pathway, supporting the hypothesis that flapping flight evolved independently in non-avialan dinosaurs and birds.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Xuri Wang of the Institute of Geology at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences and Hebei GEO University led the project, and the corresponding authors are Andrea Cau of the OPHIS Paleontological Museum in Teramo, Italy, and Qiang Ji of Hebei GEO University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The skeleton is 57 centimeters (about 22 inches) long and came out of the Jiufotang Formation, which the paper places in the Early Cretaceous and Sci.News puts at about 120 million years old<\/a>. It’s a microraptorine, one of the small feathered relatives of Velociraptor with long feathers on the legs as well as the arms, which is where the “four wings” come from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cau, Ji and their colleagues describe the group this way: “Microraptorinae is a clade of small-sized theropod dinosaurs mainly known from the Lower Cretaceous Jehol Biota of north-eastern China. Feather-like integumentary structures, true pennaceous feathers and remnants of the gut contents are found in exceptionally-preserved microraptorines, providing details of their anatomy and ecology rarely available for dinosaur fossils.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scott Hartman, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wasn’t part of the study, told Live Science it was probably eating early mammals, lizards, amphibians and juvenile dinosaurs. “It wouldn’t have been attacking any large dinosaurs. That would be like mosquitoes attacking battleships,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The name honors the American paleontologist Mark Allen Norell and the Mongolian paleontologist Rinchen Barsbold, who both died in 2025. “The new taxon name remarks and honours the exceptional contributions by R. Barsbold and M. A. Norell to the study of the bird-like dinosaurs,” the paper says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “As members of Paraves, microraptorines are among the closest relatives of birds and display a peculiar combination of features in the limb and plumage which suggests that at least some members of the clade had acquired aerial adaptations,” the researchers write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One camp thinks an early kind of flight was already there in the common ancestor of birds and microraptorines, then got improved in some lines and lost in others, like the ground-running eudromaeosaurs. The other thinks the two groups got there on their own, which would mean flight came about at least twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael Pittman, then at the University of Hong Kong and now at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a co-author of a 2021 family-tree study that suggested dinosaurs may have evolved flight at least three separate times, told Smithsonian magazine back then that “the current paradigm shift involves recognition that flight was arising independently from different, closely-related groups at nearly the same time. This moves away from the traditional idea that flight is a rare gem.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Archaeopteryx, the early bird from about 150 million years ago, is part of that argument too, and people keep going back to it with new tools, as with an Archaeopteryx fossil reanalyzed with CT scans and ultraviolet light<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cau did the family-tree analysis. “Under the phylogenetic framework reconstructed by our analyses, 194 apomorphies are optimized along the microraptorine internodes and terminal branches. About 30% of them (N = 57) are convergently acquired along the avialan internodes,” the paper reads, apomorphies being new traits and avialans being birds and their direct ancestors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those 57 include more ribs hooked to the breastbone, a longer sternum, a sturdier forelimb, an ulna longer than the humerus, a wrist bone fused to the hand and little feathers on the thumb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The order is the problem. “For example, in Microraptorinae, a first set of transformations involved the relative shortening of the manual phalanges,” the authors write, meaning the finger bones, while fusing the wrist and hand and lengthening the sternum came later. “In Avialae, on the contrary, the latter series of transformations occurred before those producing the shortening of the manual phalanges.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The findings challenge the idea that microraptorines and birds inherited either a common flight apparatus or a shared developmental process that drove its evolution,” the researchers said, according to Sci.News. “Different selective pressures probably shaped the flight-related features of each lineage.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the team forced microraptorines inside the bird group, the best trees came out 23 steps longer and the microraptorines still sat outside Archaeopteryx. “The hypothesis that the flight apparatus of microraptorines is synapomorphic with that of birds is thus strongly challenged from a quantitative perspective,” the paper says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Martin Kundr\u00e1t of Pavol Jozef \u0160af\u00e1rik University in Ko\u0161ice, Slovakia, handled the bone work. Thin slices of the left radius, a forearm bone just 49 millimeters (under 2 inches) long, showed two lines of arrested growth, the yearly pauses paleontologists count like tree rings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That puts the animal at a minimum of three years old when it died, late in its juvenile years. Some of what showed up in the bone is odd, though, and the authors say that “this unusual mixture of rapid-growth versus slow-growth characteristics may not only refer to reaching adulthood, but was perhaps related to (unknown) physiological troubles of the specimen.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In strong fliers like ducks and geese, the wing bones grow much faster than the legs. Microraptorines don’t seem to follow that rule, and the team writes that this “could indicate a peculiar precocially-developing forelimb pattern in the four-winged paravians, which is distinct from the growth models so far observed among modern flying avians.” (Precocial here means a body part that matures early.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bird skeletons have been compared on a huge scale lately, including in an AI analysis of 170,000 bird bones from more than 2,000 species<\/a>, and slices of fossil bone like this one are how that kind of comparison gets pushed back to extinct relatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many microraptor features resemble those of modern flying birds, Live Science noted, and Pei told the outlet by email that “it is reasonable to expect that these non-avialan theropods were capable of behaviors comparable to those of modern avian species.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hartman was happy to sign on. “I’m very happy that they’ve come to the conclusion that there were probably independent origins of flight amongst various groups,” he said. “I strongly agree with them.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He’s got his own picture of how they moved. “I doubt they could climb trees like a squirrel to gain height because their forelimbs don’t have that range of motion,” he said, and he thinks they may have run down slopes or jumped off hills and cliffs instead. “There are a bunch of features, like a large well-ossified [bony] sternum or breastbone that could allow for larger pectoral muscles, so they probably have a pretty solid downstroke, which is what generates the thrust to keep it going forward.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The hind wings, in his view, helped with braking and tight turns. “These are clearly little predatory buggers,” Hartman said. “If you’re leaping onto things or dropping onto things, that kind of control would be pretty important. It’s always best to surprise animals by landing where you planned to rather than somewhere you didn’t plan to.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jacqueline Nguyen, an ornithologist at the Australian Museum, told New Scientist, as quoted by Smithsonian magazine<\/a>: “This is interesting, because it shows that the evolutionary path to flight was not just a linear one, but that these evolutionary innovations appeared independently.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s one specimen, and the feathers aren’t in great shape. “The exact length and detailed morphology of the plumage are difficult to be ascertained due to the bad preservation,” the authors write, although they think the forelimb “probably possesses asymmetrical pennaceous feathers,” the stiff, vaned kind birds fly with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bone-growth part comes with its own warning label in the paper: “Albeit preliminary, histological evidence from the Microraptorinae may further challenge the hypothesis that a common developmental regime shared with birds drove their aerial adaptations.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their tree also goes against several earlier studies by putting the halszkaraptorines and unenlagiines, two other raptor-like groups, closer to birds than dromaeosaurids and troodontids. “The re-evaluation of paravians like Unenlagia and Halszkaraptor as potentially closer proxies of the ancestral body plan of birds further calls into question the direct significance of the microraptorine aerial adaptations in reconstructing the origins of the avian flight,” they write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journal’s press summary<\/a> says it plainly: “Further fossil and bone-growth evidence will be needed to test how widespread the pattern was among bird-like dinosaurs.” Hartman, for his part, told Live Science the wings might also have been for showing off to mates or warming eggs on a nest. Feathers from those times still turn up in surprising places, like a 66-million-year-old diving-bird feather found inside fossilized dinosaur poop in Montana<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA small raptor with a 57-centimeter skeleton<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why these little dinosaurs matter for the flight question<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Same toolkit, built in a different order<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A forearm bone with two growth lines<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Paleontologists outside the team mostly agree<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What one fossil can’t settle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n