If you were to go back in time to the Middle/Late Jurassic of China, you may see some ferocious, enormous dinosaurs towering above you. But you wouldn’t have to face giants to see dinosaurs in just about any niche around you. If you retreated to the forest and waited quietly against the trunk of an evergreen, you may spot the movement of the tiny, tree-dwelling Ambopteryx longibrachium.
Imagine Ambopteryx perched in a tree, its fuzzy body a little shorter than a bowling pin, with long, skinny tail feathers falling below the branch. It lazily stretches out its arms, and between its extended fingers you can see sunlight muted through thin flaps of skin. Then the skin flaps, called patagia, stretch between the fingers, over a rod protruding downward from its wrist, called the styliform element, then continue to attach to its torso. The creature almost resembles a feathery bat with a long neck and pointy nose. The animal looks up, then launches itself from the bough, disappearing swiftly into the pines.
This is how we imagine Ambopteryx, the dinosaur discovery announced earlier in May, in a study published in the journal Nature. Ambopteryx is similar to its close relative Yi qi, which stunned the paleontology community when it was announced in 2015. Both animals are likened to dragons as bat-winged dinosaurs: feathered, but not birds, and not on the evolutionary timeline that would lead to modern birds either.
However, this is not how we’ve always envisioned members of this dinosaur family, called scansoriopterygids. In 2002 and 2008, paleontologists announced the discovery of the first two members of this family: Scansoriopteryx and Epidexipteryx respectively. Having seen no evidence that these creatures had wings, they were instead described as having bizarre, lengthy fingers, extending from their hands like spindly spider legs capped with claws.
