Meet the world's largest 'four-winged' dinosaur

Someday, this could be immortalized as one of the Dinobots: a newly discovered "four-winged" dinosaur that might have glided across the Cretaceous skies.

 

Meet Changyuraptor yangi, the 125 million-year-old flying raptor with exceptionally long feathers on its "hindwings" that was recently discovered in China.

 

"With tail feathers that are nearly 30 cm long, roughly 30% the length of the skeleton, the new fossil possesses the longest known feathers for any non-avian dinosaur," researchers Gang Han, Luis Chiappe, Shu-An Ji, Michael Habib, Alan Turner, Anusuya Chinsamy, Xueling Liu and Lizhuo Han said on Nature.com.

 

They described the newest discovery a microraptorine, a group of "predatory dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaurs with aerodynamic capacity" and close relatives of birds.

 

Changyuraptor yangi is a four-winged microraptorine that is the "largest theropod with long, pennaceous feathers attached to the lower hind limbs (that is, ‘hindwings’)," they added.

 

A separate article on io9.com said the Early Cretaceous raptor was discovered in the Liaoning Province of northeastern China.

 

It said these creatures could have been "flying long before birds split off from dinosaurs."

 

"What's more, it's the largest known theropod with long feathers attached to the lower hind limbs. And like modern birds, this animal was cloaked entirely in feathers," it said.

 

Also, it said an analysis of Changyuraptor's bone microstructure shows the raptor was an adult weighing about nine pounds.

 

The raptor had "sharp steak-knife-like serrated teeth" showing it was a predator likely eating bird, fish remains, small mammals, and lizards.

 

It lived in what was a temperate forest of mostly conifers, with an undergrowth of ferms and some of the planet's first flowering plants.

 

Quoting Chiappe and his team, io9 said the creature is capable of decreasing descent speed and assuring safe landings, with its long tail working like an elevator and flaps of an aircraft.

 

It also quoted Chiappe as saying this raptor is "much bigger than previous dinosaurs capable of flight, so it extends our understanding of what these animals were capable of doing."

 

On the other hand, io9 said the study came a week after the announcement of the discovery of the largest bird to have ever flown. — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News