Jurassic birds first emerged 150 million to 148 million years ago, and fossils of them are rare, so experts are just starting to understand how early birds diversified and evolved the ability to fly.
Analysis of the fossilized skeleton revealed the animal was small and weighed about 1.8 pounds (0.8 kilograms). "It was probably as large as a crow," Wang told Live Science via email.
Y. yangyuanensis also had slender cranial elements and sparsely spaced teeth. These features, alongside the curved claw-like toes that were capable of securing prey, suggest that the animal's diet included meat.
This combination of features suggests that "the morphological gap between birds and dinosaurs is much smaller than we thought," he added.
Wang suggested that Y. yangyuanensis was a flightless bird, but not one specialized to live in trees or wade in the swamps in the region. It was a small carnivore, with similar proportions to a pheasant, that was well adapted for running. "I think there are no directly comparable modern birds," he said.
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This adds to evidence that "the ability to fly arose not once, but several times among disparate groups of carnivorous dinosaurs that are closely related to birds," wrote Fernando Novas, a paleontologist at the Felix de Azara Natural History Foundation in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who wasn’t involved in the study, in an accompanying article in Nature. This includes flight evolving in early birds and in scansoriopterygid dinosaurs, which had membranous folds like the wings of bats, and the four-winged microraptors. Y. yangyuanensis seems to have taken a different road, eschewing the flying ways of its relatives.
"It highlights the extraordinary breadth of ecological and morphological diversification that took place close to the origins of avialans," Wang said.
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