The arm and shoulder bones of a gliding dinosaur might have just revealed the solution to a gruesome whodunit.
Since 2002, researchers have unearthed more than 100 prehistoric bird remains in the Changma Basin. It’s a fossil bed in northwestern China. The remains here date back to about 120 million years ago. Some include hacked-up pellets containing broken bones. Those pellets resemble ones coughed up by today’s owls.
Paleontologists long assumed a meat-eating dinosaur was to blame. But fossil evidence of the predator has been hard to find — until now.
A new species of dinosaur sporting wing feathers on its arms and legs may be to blame. Researchers used shoulder and upper arm bones found in the same fossil bed to identify the new species. Named Jian changmaensis, it belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as microraptors. These small, speedy dinos were cousins of the famed velociraptor.
The team shared...
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