{"id":525912,"date":"2026-06-30T14:09:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T14:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/525912\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T14:09:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T14:09:20","slug":"four-winged-dinosaur-may-have-hunted-early-birds-120-million-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/525912\/","title":{"rendered":"Four-Winged Dinosaur May Have Hunted Early Birds 120 Million Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dramatic<\/a>Artistic reconstruction of Jian changmaensis, attacking an early bird.\u00a0Credit: Lewis LaRosa\/J\u00e3o Canola<\/p>\n

At a Cretaceous <\/a>lake in what is now northwestern China, paleontologists have found the fossilized remains of ancient birds piled up in the mud by the hundreds. Some of their bones were smashed into tight, pellet-like clumps\u2014the kind of remains a predator might cough up after a meal\u2014but the hunter itself left no trace in the fossil record.<\/p>\n

Now researchers say a lone 120-million-year-old shoulder and arm may reveal the culprit: Jian changmaensis<\/a>, a newly named, feathered microraptor <\/a>that likely glided through the trees<\/a> on four winglike limbs. <\/p>\n

So these early birds were likely being hunted by a feathered dinosaur that still trying to figure out powered flight, a stunning predator-prey dynamic that is rarely spoken about among conversations dominated by more charismatic predator dinosaurs like T.rex.<\/p>\n

One Wing<\/p>\n

\"Fossilized<\/a>The holotype\u2019s one arm. Credit: Hailu You<\/p>\n

The Changma Basin, in Gansu Province, has yielded more than 100 partial bird skeletons from the Lower Cretaceous Xiagou Formation<\/a>. Many preserve traces of feathers, skin, and other soft tissues. The site is especially known for yielding Gansus yumenensis<\/a>, one of the earliest fossil birds found in China.<\/p>\n

\"Scenic<\/a>The Changma Basin is the site of an ancient lake, filled with prehistoric bird fossils, in northwestern China.\u00a0Credit: Matt Lamanna<\/p>\n

Until now, that picture was strangely one-sided. Changma had birds in abundance, but almost no sign of the larger animals that lived beside them. Then researchers reexamined a fossil first noted years ago: part of a left shoulder and forelimb, including the scapulocoracoid, humerus, radius, and ulna.<\/p>\n

The arm bones did not match Changma\u2019s birds. Instead, they pointed to a microraptor, a feathered carnivore from the same dinosaur family as Velociraptor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the new study, researchers describe that fossil as a new genus and species, Jian changmaensis\u2014from Ji\u0101n, the one-winged bird from Chinese mythology, a nod to the animal\u2019s birdlike body and the lone preserved forelimb and changmaensis from the place where it was found.<\/p>\n

\u201cScientists have found these weird, broken-up clusters of bird bones at this site, and we didn\u2019t know what made them,\u201d said Jingmai O\u2019Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum and senior author of the study. \u201cThis new microraptor dinosaur, Jian changmaensis, is our best guess,\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00d7<\/p>\n

Thank you! One more thing…<\/p>\n

Please check your inbox and confirm your subscription.<\/p>\n

The fossil is fragmentary, but the context in which it was found carries weight. At a site dominated by early birds, Jian gives researchers their first clear non-bird dinosaur body fossil from the Changma Basin\u2014and it belonged to a larger carnivore.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the only dinosaur found at this site that wasn\u2019t a bird, it was a carnivore, and it was much bigger than everything else that we\u2019ve found there,\u201d O\u2019Connor noted.<\/p>\n

Four Wings<\/p>\n

Jian changmaensis was a dromaeosaur<\/a>, a.k.a. a raptor. Unlike the exaggerated movie adaptations, these animals looked more birdlike and were far smaller.<\/p>\n

The holotype consists of only the shoulder and arm\u2014the one wing. The upper arm and the shoulder matched the anatomy of microraptors, which carried long feathers on both the forelimbs and hind limbs. In life, Jian probably had four winglike surfaces: two on its arms and two on its legs.<\/p>\n

That does not mean it flew like a crow. Microraptor anatomy suggests they could not sustain flapping flight. Instead, this creature was likely a good climber that probably glided between trees and ambushed prey. <\/p>\n

\u201cJian and the other microraptors probably weren\u2019t capable of true, powered flight, but they could probably glide like a flying squirrel,\u201d O\u2019Connor explained.<\/p>\n

It likely had a toothed snout, a long bony tail and the trademark curved claws on its feet.<\/p>\n

The preserved upper arm measures about 10 centimeters (4 inches). By comparing it with related microraptors, researchers estimate that Jian may have had a wingspan of roughly 1.2 meters (4 feet), about the span of a barn owl. That made it large for a microraptor, though still smaller than some of the group\u2019s biggest known relatives.<\/p>\n

A Predator at the Lake\u2019s Edge<\/p>\n

\"Prehistoric<\/a>Artistic reconstruction of wildlife in ancient Changma Basin, China. Credit: Cindy Joli\/Julio Francisco Garza Lorenzo\/Ren\u00e9 D\u00e1vila Rodr\u00edguez<\/p>\n

The Changma Basin was not a dinosaur graveyard\u2014although, technically birds are dinosaurs. It was an ancient lake, and lakes tend to preserve the animals that lived in or near the water. That preservation bias may explain the imbalance: the lake sediments captured birds such as Gansus, which had webbed feet, far more often than they captured a tree-dwelling predator like Jian.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you could take a time machine back 120 million years ago, you\u2019d be on the shore of a vast lake with vegetation surrounding it,\u201d Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and a coauthor of the study, told CNN<\/a>. \u201cIt stands to reason that maybe if you\u2019re looking in a lake, you might find the animals that are living there more than you would find the animals that are living around the margins.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers cannot prove Jian ate Changma\u2019s birds. No stomach contents preserve its last meal. But the evidence now lines up: abundant small birds, pellet-like bone masses and one unusually large microraptor in the same deposits.<\/p>\n

The find sharpens the picture of Changma from a bird-rich lake into a habitat with predators, prey, and close dinosaur relatives experimenting with aerial movement long before modern birds. <\/p>\n

The study was published in the journal Annals of Carnegie Museum<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artistic reconstruction of Jian changmaensis, attacking an early bird.\u00a0Credit: Lewis LaRosa\/J\u00e3o Canola At a Cretaceous lake in what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":525913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[217066,9154,203904,61,60,223921,223922,82,223923],"class_list":["post-525912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-changma-basin","tag-cretaceous","tag-dinosaur-fossils","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jian-changmaensis","tag-microraptor","tag-science","tag-xiagou-formation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/525913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}