Pittsburgh Museum Finds Gliding Dinosaur in China

A team led by Carnegie Museum of Natural History just discovered a missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds, and it could glide through ancient forests like a flying squirrel.

Meet Jian changmaensis, a velociraptor relative about the size of a red-tailed hawk that lived 120 million years ago in what is now northwestern China. The international team, co-led by Pittsburgh's Matt Lamanna, unearthed the fossil in 2008 and spent years studying its remarkable features.

The discovery centers on a partial shoulder and feathered wing found in the Changma Basin of China's Gansu Province. Lamanna joined field teams there in 2004, 2005, and 2009, working alongside Chinese researchers to piece together this prehistoric puzzle.

Scientists named the dinosaur after a one-winged bird in Chinese mythology because they found only one wing and wished they had discovered both. But that single wing tells an incredible story about how feathered dinosaurs eventually took to the skies.

"It's about as close as you can be to being a bird without being a bird," Lamanna explained. While Jian couldn't truly fly, it likely glided between trees hunting prehistoric birds and small animals, using feathered wings on its arms and legs.

The find challenges everything we thought we knew about dinosaurs. For decades, people imagined giant scaly reptiles like T. rex, but research over the past 30 years has completely rewritten that picture.

"Research in recent decades has taken dinosaurs from scaly monsters to the feathered ancestors of modern birds," Lamanna said. In fact, every bird you see today is technically a descendant of dinosaurs that survived when others went extinct.

Why This Inspires

This discovery opens doors to understanding one of nature's most successful transformations. Scientists can now explore how gliding dinosaurs spread across huge distances and why birds ultimately became the only dinosaurs to survive the meteor strike that ended the Cretaceous Period.

Jingmai O'Connor from Chicago's Field Museum, who collaborated on the research published in Annals of Carnegie Museum, sees enormous potential in these findings. The fossil provides strong evidence that gliding dromaeosaurids lived across vast geographic ranges, raising new questions about their evolution and flight abilities.

Feathers didn't start as flight tools either. Scientists believe they first evolved from fuzzy protofeathers that provided insulation for warm-blooded dinosaurs, then gradually developed into the complex structures that enabled some species to glide and eventually fly.

The Carnegie Museum team's patience paid off beautifully, turning years of fieldwork and careful study into knowledge that rewrites evolutionary history one fossil at a time.