A farmer in Liaoning province, in northeastern China, is credited with finding a 57-centimeter skeleton that now carries the name Norellraptor barsboldi. Nature’s news report describes the animal as a small, feathered predator of the kind known as a microraptorine, a group of meat-eaters that weighed about one kilogram and carried feathers on their limbs. The fossil belongs to the Jehol Biota of the Early Cretaceous, about 120 million years old by Sci.News’s reckoning.
The description appeared in Nature Communications on Sept. 29, led by Xuri Wang with Andrea Cau, Qiang Ji and colleagues. Its central argument is that the machinery of flight was assembled in this dinosaur family along a different path from the one birds followed, a claim that rests on a phylogenetic analysis of the whole microraptorine group and not on the single skeleton alone.
Holotype 130108-MHGU-F4281
The specimen is catalogued as 130108-MHGU-F4281, a complete skeleton with partial plumage imprints, according to the paper’s abstract page. It comes from Lamadong Town in Jianchang County, western Liaoning, in the Lower Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation, which is dated to roughly 145 to 100 million years ago. Histology of the radius indicates the animal was at least three years old when it died. The authors place it among the late-diverging microraptorines and argue that its flight adaptations were put together step by step rather than arriving as a package.
The Nature Portfolio press release names the paper “Independent assembly of the flight apparatus in a non-avian dinosaur clade.” Neither it nor the paper page says who found the fossil, so the farmer detail rests on Nature’s journalists. The genus honors the American paleontologist Mark Norell, and the species name honors Rinchen Barsbold, Smithsonian Magazine reports; Nature appended a clarification on Oct. 7 correcting the spelling of Barsbold’s surname.
194 Changes Across the Clade
The number in circulation is 194, and its scope is easy to misread. According to the paper, 194 anatomical changes, called apomorphies, are optimized along the microraptorine branches of the authors’ family tree. That is a clade-wide tally of inferred changes accumulating across the group, and it is not an inventory of what Norellraptor itself carries.
Of those 194, about 30 percent, or 57, also arose independently along the lineage leading to birds, including wing feathers, hook-shaped toe bones and a forearm bone longer than the upper arm bone, Sci.News reports. The sequence mattered more than the overlap. The shared features did not appear in the same order in the two groups, which led the authors to conclude that the two lineages were not following one developmental script.
Ji, of Hebei GEO University and the paper’s corresponding author, and Cau, of the OPHIS Paleontological Museum, are the two team members the write-up quotes. It carries the team’s compact version of the claim, that different selective pressures probably shaped the flight-related features of each lineage. Put plainly, microraptorines and early birds ended up with overlapping toolkits for similar aerodynamic problems, but they assembled the parts in different orders and likely for different reasons.
Independent Wings
Outside paleontologists read the result as support for an idea that has been gaining ground. Michael Pittman of the Chinese University of Hong Kong told Nature the study further supports the hypothesis that flight evolved multiple times among feathered dinosaurs, and Neil Gostling of the University of Southampton said the animals were exploring all of the avenues open to them.
Pittman has argued the same case before. The Smithsonian Magazine report quotes him, as co-author of a 2021 study, saying the new picture moves away from the traditional idea that flight is a rare gem among dinosaurs. If that reading holds, the group around Norellraptor was not an evolutionary dead end that happened to flap, but one of several experiments in flight running at the same time as the line that led to modern birds, each with its own order of acquiring wings, long forearms and toe hooks.
Rui Pei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not part of the team, said in Live Science that the findings back the idea that flapping flight arose independently in non-avialan dinosaurs and in birds. Jacqueline Nguyen of the Australian Museum told Smithsonian Magazine the route to flight was not just a linear one.
Neither Pei nor Nguyen worked on the study.
Smithsonian Magazine describes the animal as a four-winged dinosaur with a long tail, sharp teeth and claws, roughly 22 inches long. Because microraptorines sit close to birds on the family tree, a well-preserved late-diverging member gives researchers a rare anchor for comparing the two sequences. Scott Hartman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that an animal this size probably ate small creatures such as early mammals and lizards rather than larger dinosaurs.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
More from Morning Overview
