Dec. 13, 2006 — A new fossil discovery from China shows that a tiny squirrel-like creature glided through the air during the age of dinosaurs, more than 75 million years earlier than scientists had documented that ability in a mammal.
The creature might have even beaten birds into the air.
Like today's flying squirrels, it stretched a furry membrane between its limbs to provide an airfoil for gliding after it jumped from a tree. But it's not related to anything living today.
Scientists don't know exactly when the animal lived. Its remains could be anywhere from 130 million to 164 million years old, said Jin Meng of the American Museum of Natural History. He and colleagues from Beijing report the discovery in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
So it's clearly older than the 51 million-year-old bat that used to be the oldest evidence of flying or gliding in a mammal. And it has a chance of preceding the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, which flew about 150 million years ago.
It is much younger than flying reptiles called pterosaurs, which are dated from 230 million years ago.
Still, added to a recent find in the same locale in northeastern China that revealed a semi-aquatic creature, the discovery shows that early mammals were a lot more varied than the land-loving creatures scientists have traditionally envisioned, Meng said.
He and colleagues dubbed the animal Volaticotherium antiquus, which is Latin and Greek for "ancient flying (or winged) beast."
