But these specimens often turned up as broken fragments, including pellets that looked suspiciously like those coughed up<\/a> by modern predatory birds, such as hawks and owls.<\/p>\n Something, it seemed, was hunting these early birds.<\/p>\n Now, paleontologists believe they may have identified the culprit: a new genus and species of carnivorous dinosaur<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Scientists have found these weird, broken-up clusters of bird bones at this site, and we didn’t know what made them. This new microraptor dinosaur, Jian changmaensis<\/a>, is our best guess,” says<\/a> Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and senior author of a paper describing the new species.<\/p>\n “It’s the only dinosaur found at this site that wasn’t a bird \u2013 it was a carnivore, and it was much bigger than everything else that we’ve found there.”<\/p>\n It may not have been a bird, but with its feathers and wing-like appendages, Jian sure looked like one.<\/p>\n But there were some major differences too: It sported a saurian snout in place of a beak, a long tail, and, unfortunately for the local bird population, curved claws on its toes.<\/p>\n If that weapon of choice sounds familiar, it’s probably because some of Jian’s cousins have been brandishing them on the big screen<\/a> for more than 30 years. Jian was much smaller than Velociraptor though, even when you take Hollywood embellishments out of the equation.<\/p>\n The new species belongs to a separate clade called microraptors<\/a>, and among its closer relatives, Jian was a monster.<\/p>\n “Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found,” says<\/a> O’Connor.<\/p>\n “The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot (1.2-meter) wingspan, around the size of a barn owl.”<\/p>\n In fact, this arm bone is the only piece of Jian we currently have, and that’s reflected in its name.<\/p>\n The genus name is inspired by Ji\u0101n<\/a>, a one-winged bird in Chinese mythology. The species epithet, changmaensis, is named after the Changma locality<\/a> in China, where the remains were found.<\/p>\n Despite the fragmented fossil, its discoverers used what is known about related species of microraptors<\/a> to infer more about Jian.<\/p>\n They believe it probably had long feathers<\/a> not just on its forelimbs but its legs too, giving it four ‘wings’ in a sense.<\/p>\n “Jian and the other microraptors probably weren’t capable of true, powered flight, but they could probably glide like a flying squirrel,” says<\/a> O’Connor.<\/p>\n That, it seems, was enough to hunt down birds that were capable of flight. And judging by the fossils that dominate the site, Jian had a veritable buffet to dine on.<\/p>\n Related: New ‘Megaraptor’ Species Found With Shocking Last Meal Still in Its Mouth<\/a><\/p>\n “Our team has recovered more than a hundred bird fossils at Changma, but only this single non-avian dinosaur specimen,” says<\/a> Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.<\/p>\n “Jian provides critical new insight into the biological history of the Changma region and the ecological context of the ancestors of today’s birds.”<\/p>\n![\"'Four-Winged'](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/fossil-birds-642x344.jpg\")
An artist’s impression of some of the many early bird species that once lived in the Changma Basin, China. (Cindy Joli\/Julio Francisco Garza Lorenzo\/Ren\u00e9 D\u00e1vila Rodr\u00edguez<\/a>)<\/p>\n![\"'Four-Winged'](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Jian_changmaensis_holotype_GSGM-D050-642x762.png\")
Jian changmaensis is known only from its upper forelimb bones. (Zhou et al., Ann. Carnegie Mus.<\/a>, 2026)<\/p>\n![\"Subscribe](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/FOMO-1200x628-_Dont-miss-the-next-breakthrough_-cosmic-colourful-642x336.jpg\")
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