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 The dinosaur, named Yi qi (meaning "strange wing" in Mandarin and
pronounced EE-chee), lived about 160 million years during the
Jurassic Period, about 10 million years before the earliest-known
bird, Archaeopteryx.
It is considered a cousin of birds, but boasted membranous wings
made of skin like those of the extinct flying reptiles known as
pterosaurs, which lived at the same time, and bats, which appeared
more than 100 million years later, instead of the stiff, plume-like
feathers of birds.
Each wing was supported by a clawed, three-fingered hand and a
rod-like bone extending from the wrist. One of the fingers was much
longer than the others. Feathers preserved around its head, neck and
limbs are more similar to hairs or bristles than to bird flight
feathers.
 "It's hard to imagine that it could have flapped very effectively,
since the rod-like bone was presumably a fairly unwieldy thing to
have attached to the wrist," said paleontologist Corwin Sullivan of
the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in
Beijing.
"So our guess would be that Yi qi was gliding or maybe combining
gliding with some relatively inefficient flapping."
Before aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the world's
first successful airplane, others dabbled with all manner of
experimental flying machines. There was an analogous period of
flight experimentation among dinosaurs before small feathered ones
evolved into birds. Finding a dinosaur with membranous wings was
"quite amazing and unexpected," Sullivan said. "Yi qi illustrates
the flight-related evolutionary tinkering that was going on in the
dinosaur precursors to birds."
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Patches of the membranous wing tissue were preserved in the fossil
discovered in Hebei Province by a local farmer, but the overall wing
shape remains uncertain.
The dinosaur probably lived in trees and used peg-like teeth to
munch lizards, mammals and insects, and perhaps fruit.
"This guy is not far from the first birds, in fact," said
paleontologist Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Linyi
University. "It belongs to a bizarre dinosaur group called the
scansoriopterygids, which are closely related to the most primitive
birds such as Archaeopteryx."
Yi qi is the shortest name of any of the more than 700 identified
dinosaur species.
The research appears in the journal Nature.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Ted Botha)
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