Telegraph => Ancient lizard used ribs to fly
I haven’t had anything about paleontology in a while and in keeping with Primeval’s total lack of dinosurs, here’s another “not a dinosaurâ€.
A Chinese team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that this creature had a wing-like membrane spread between eight elongated ribs to the left and right of the lizard’s body, an unusual arrangement only seen today in the dragon lizards of southeast Asia.
The fossil specimen described by Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeonanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and colleagues shows the complete skeleton, including the splayed ribs, and imprints from the skin of a lizard that lived in the Early Cretaceous period.
The six inch long skeleton of the insect eater was found in the Liaoning Province of northeastern China, and the species of lizard was named Xianglong zhaoi, after the Chinese for flying dragon and Zhao Dayu, one of the founders of the Liaoning Palaeontological Museum.
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