杏吧原创

A FOUR-WINGED dinosaur discovered in January is poised to revolutionise our ideas of how birds took to the sky.

A stunning set of six fossils revealed a small dinosaur with flight feathers covering its legs, as well as its tail and arms, forming an extra pair of wings never seen before. Palaeontologists are convinced this proto-bird would have been able to fly, and hail its discovery as being potentially as important as that of Archaeopteryx.

The four-winged flyer, dubbed Microraptor gui, was discovered in China and lived around 130 million years ago. Particularly baffling is that the feathers at the ends of its arms and legs are twice as long as those close to its body, while in most creatures, gliding surfaces are narrower the farther they are from the body.

Microraptors are the most primitive 鈥渄romaeosaurs鈥�, two-legged predatory dinosaurs that are closely related to birds.