ELY: A pint-sized dinosaur has a big surprise: It apparently sported a pair of bizarre wings.
Dinosaurs normally used wings mostly made of feathers for flight. But the newly discovered creature evidently had wings made of skin instead, like those of a bat or some ancient flying reptiles.
It’s not clear whether they flapped or merely let the creature glide.
A fossil of the two-legged dinosaur was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. The creature weighed less than a pound when it lived in northeast China some 160 million years ago. The Chinese researchers named it Yi qi (pronounced “ee chee”), which is Mandarin for “strange wing.”
