Lead researcher Dr Steve Brusatte said it was “the single most beautiful fossil I have had the privilege to work on.”
“ …It will blow some people’s minds to realise that those dinosaurs in the movies would have been even weirder, and I think even scarier - like big fluffy birds from hell.”
“So maybe [wings] did not evolve for flight - perhaps they evolved as a display structure, or to protect eggs in the nest. Or maybe this animal was starting to move around in the trees and was able to glide.”
Dr Bill Sellers from the University of Manchester added these details about the origin of birds. “It doesn’t look like [this dinosaur] could fly, although that needs more investigation. “However it does mean that we now know about a huge range of these early bird-like dinosaurs; some species are running around on the ground and some are experimenting with early flight.”
“[This] gives us a snapshot of what life was like at the earliest stages of bird evolution. China is the epicentre of palaeontology right now. There are [museum] storerooms full of new dinosaur fossils that have never been studied before. This is the most exciting time maybe in the history of palaeontology.”
