Changyuraptor

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Changyuraptor
Live reconstruction

Live reconstruction

Temporal occurrence
Lower Cretaceous ( Aptium )
126.3 to 112.9 million years
Locations
Systematics
Lizard dinosaur (Saurischia)
Theropoda
Deinonychosauria
Dromaeosauridae
Microraptorinae
Changyuraptor
Scientific name
Changyuraptor
Han , Chiappe , Ji , Habib , Turner , Chinsamy , Liu & Han , 2014
species
  • Changyuraptor yangi Han et al., 2014

Changyuraptor ( Chin. Changyu - "long feather", Latin raptor - "robber") is a genus of dromaeosaurids from the subgroup of Microraptorinae , which lived about 125 million years ago in the late Lower Cretaceous East Asia. The only known species is Changyuraptor yangi . This is so far known from a single specimen, the complete skeleton of a fully grown individual (at least 4 years old) in anatomically correct preservation, including detailed impressions of the plumage. It comes from the Yixiang Formation ( Jehol Group ) of Liaoning Province in China. The art epithet honors Yang Yandong, director of Bohai University in Jinzhou .

Changyuraptor , like its close relative Microraptor , possessed feather wings on all four extremities and long feathers on the tail, and like Microraptor , Changyuraptor was likely a glider. The length of the type specimen is 1.32 meters from the tip of the snout to the tip of the tail. The live weight of this animal is estimated at 4 kilograms. This is by far the largest representative of the microraptorins to date.

Another special feature of Changyuraptor is the small size difference between the fore and hind limbs. The length of the front limbs is 96% of the length of the hind limbs. Thus, the "arms" of Changyuraptor relative to the legs are sometimes significantly more than 20% longer than the non-microraptorin Jehol dromaeosaurids and still 7% longer than those of Microraptor.

Besides Microraptor , Changyuraptor is the only undoubted "four-winged" dinosaur so far. So far it was assumed that the development of the ability to locomotion in the air in the dromaeosaurids was linked to a reduction in body size. The Changyuraptor discovery contradicts this hypothesis. However , compared to Microraptor , Changyuraptor has exceptionally long tail feathers. These could have resulted in a more stable angle of attack during the gliding flight and at the same time, since the gliding flight would have been steeper than the Microraptor due to the greater weight of the Changyuraptor , reduced the descent speed. A combination of both would have enabled the most precise possible attacks on prey as well as the softest possible landing.

literature

  • Gang Han, Luis M. Chiappe , Shu-An Ji, Michael Habib, Alan H. Turner, Anusuya Chinsamy, Xueling Liu, Lizhuo Han: A new raptorial dinosaur with exceptionally long feathering provides insights into dromaeosaurid flight performance. In: Nature Communications. Vol. 5, article number 4382, 2014, ISSN  2041-1723 , doi : 10.1038 / ncomms5382 .

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