#strange wing

[wolfraven-creations]

I drew another interesting dinosaur, this one is Yi qi. A small theropod that looks like a bat and bird mixed together! I based mine on a Reeve's pheasant.

[sombertide-0]

Yi Qi! Another one of my faves! Pronounced yee-shee

edit: i've been told by a few people that it's actually pronounced "yee-chee", my bad, i've only ever heard it pronounced the other way, thank you for the correction!

[earthstory]

Yi qi

Common name: Batdino Size: Pigeon sized (10cm). Age: Mid Jurassic (160 million years ago) Geographic range: China/Mongolia. Liked: Flying/gliding. Disliked: Being eaten. Taxonomy: Animalia > Chordata > Dinosauria > Theropoda>Scansoriopterygidae>Yi>qi

The Jehol and Daohugou Biota of north eastern China (see http://on.fb.me/1cViPit and http://on.fb.me/1Hnu8YF) have repeatedly stunned palaeontologists over the last couple of decades with their well preserved 160 and 130 million year old ecosystems. The time period covered by the two formations spanned the transition between feathered dinosaurs and birds, amongst other things, and the exceptional preservation of these fossilised organisms has brought us many feathers, mammalian fur and other rarities to study that are usually not preserved in fossilisation.

Yi qi comes from the older rocks of the Daohugou formation, some 160 million years old. These are the remnants of tree shaded lakes that were periodically covered in huge volumes of volcanic ash from pyroclastic flows, each killing a wide diversity of animals and shunting them into the lake beds, where the fine grained ash preserved them in near perfect detail. Only one geologically flattened partial specimen exists, the size of a medium bird that was maybe a tree dweller. The name comes from the Chinese for 'strange wing'.

Several features of its anatomy are unique. Its elongated third finger had a membrane of sliding skin and a never before seen long bony strut attached at the wrist, resulting in a bat shaped wing arrangement. Whether a newly evolved wrist bone or a ossified cartilage, the feature is very odd. The critter was a feathered therepod, whose plumes resembled quills or paintbrushes ( for an idea of what these dino feathers looked like, see my past posts of them preserved in amber, Jurassic park style, at http://on.fb.me/1DTZQdF and http://on.fb.me/1QpTFac). They were covered all over and quite dense, up to 6 cm long. Some of the bat like membrane was also preserved, and no flight feathers were present. They analysed the melanosomes for colour and found the feathers were black like a crow's and brown on the head.

The resemblance to a bat would be an example of convergent evolution, where different animals from widely varied evolutionary backgrounds take on a similar shape, such as tuna fish, dolphins (mammals) and ichthyosaurs (reptiles). It also suggests that flight evolved several times using different means in the dinosaurian and early bird lineages with maybe several groups transitioning from gliding to powered flight. It is also a transitional form between feathered dinos evolving into birds and the unrelated pterosaurs, with their more bat like wing structures. This is certainly an interesting and unusual twig on the great tree of expressed nucleic acids that we call life, and, incidentally, the dinosaur with the shortest name of all.

Loz

Image credit: graphic Dinostar Co. Ltd., photos Zang Hailong http://bit.ly/1EYblI0 http://bit.ly/1EDJFq6 http://bit.ly/1GI1QNp http://bit.ly/1GwyNXL

[paleontoluci-blog]

Aight so I just found out about a cool(tm) dinosaur thing

By ★Kumiko★ - https://www.flickr.com/photos/kmkmks/27011985534/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57176412

Probably just late to the party, but it’s still cool.

That thing is Yi qi, and is probably the coolest dinosaur thing I’ve ever seen and/or heard about.  It’s a ‘pocket-sized’ bat/bird creature that had feathers AND membranous wings.  And to boot, it was from the Middle-Late Jurassic.  

Here’s a really neat reconstruction:

By Emily Willoughby, ([email protected], emilywilloughby.com) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39933328

It was found in 2015 by a farmer, Wang Jianrong, in Heibei.  It was eventually sold to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature.  Once there, the fossils were prepared.

There is only one partial skeleton found, and that’s the type specimen, of course. Idk man, I think it’s cool.  

It’s name means (Yi) wing, and (qi) strange.  Strange wing, indeed.  

[the-merbeast]

Day 17: Yi qi, "strange wing"

Scanned it in! This here is Yi. Simply Yi. The shortest dinosaur genus name. It lived in Jurassic China and was super small, weighing less than a pound. The coolest and most interesting thing about this dino is the elongated third finger which helped support a skin membrane. It is unique in having this, as other relatives to the Yi had instead gone down the feather path. Regardless of how cool a tiny wyvern-like dinosaur would have been, it could not actually fly. Just gliding, like a sugarglider!

Random facts! The fossil was discovered in a Chinese quarry in 2007. After much study and preparation, it was deemed authentic and published in 2015. "Yi" is mandarin for "wing."

[dreamzs338]

Weird “dinobat” Discovered in China

Weird “dinobat” Discovered in China

A strange new dinosaur with bat-like wings has been discovered by a farmer in China and is now helping to shed new light on the evolution of flight. Paleontologists in China say the impeccably preserved fossil belongs to a small dinosaur thought to havelived 160 million years ago. The bizarre looking creature had slight stiff feathers on its body and long finger-like bones extending from each…

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