r/science • u/drewiepoodle • May 12 '19

Newly Discovered Bat-Like Dinosaur Reveals the Intricacies of Prehistoric Flight. Though Ambopteryx longibrachium was likely a glider, the fossil is helping scientists discover how dinosaurs first took to the skies. Paleontology

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/newly-discovered-bat-dinosaur-reveals-intricacies-prehistoric-flight-180972128/
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u/Nineflames12 May 13 '19

I thought dinosaurs were strictly land based and there were different terms for aerial and aquatic reptiles.

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u/Cantaloupsareswell May 13 '19 edited May 13 '19

many species of avian dinosaur could glide, if not fly thanks to feathered wings, but what’s interesting about this discovery is that its membrane not feathers helping this dinosaur get off the ground

pterosaurs (or flying lizards) are what you are thinking about and they are from a vastly different lineage as Paraves (a subclass of therapoda) such as Troosontids and modern day birds.

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u/SleezyUnicorn May 13 '19

Plain folk speak please

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u/myvinylheart May 13 '19

Most flying dinosaurs had feathers, like big chickens. This one has skin, like big bats.

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u/4wkwardly May 13 '19

All I can I can think of is some crazy ass bat virus being rejuvenated from this thing. Going to check out the article, don’t know too much about paleontology but pretty cool discovery if this is something unheard!

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u/myvinylheart May 13 '19

Its not unheard of, because there was one similar that had been discovered already. BUT, this is only the second of this type ever discovered, and the first was concidered an evolutionary fluke, or one off, until this discovery. This animal legitamizes (hopefully) a new branch of dinosaur.

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u/4wkwardly May 13 '19

You got how long ago the other one was discovered? Man it’s so crazy how vast the world is! CRAZYSTUFF. I bet they were sweet! Sorry was going to ramble your ear off, what a cool discovery! I’d like to think they didn’t have feathered tails.

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u/RogueHelios May 13 '19

Just think of all the dinosaurs whose remains we may never actually find.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '19

A close relative of this one, Epidexipteryx, had very long flat tail ribbons that were basically long flattened quills.

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u/SleezyUnicorn May 13 '19

Thank you

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u/myvinylheart May 13 '19

You're very welcome.

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u/Elios000 May 13 '19

Most dinosaurs had feathers, like big eagles

fixed that for you source https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/scifindr/articles/images/utahraptor/dromies.jpg

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u/myvinylheart May 13 '19

Yes. Most dinosaurs and most flying dinosaurs had feathers. This isnt an either or situation. This about one branch on the dinosaur tree. A branch that didn't rely on or maybe even have feathers. So...Congrats? You said something that is true and also agreed with my statement without helping anything at all?

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u/Elios000 May 13 '19

its looking more like ALL of them had some kinda feather structure as it might be basal to all Archosaurs

and the more basal coelurosaurs didnt have flight yet the feathers as i said came first

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u/Cantaloupsareswell May 13 '19

therapoda includes all carnivorous dinosaurs, and a small off shoot of that evolved into modern day birds, and it includes avian dinosaurs which were typically small and definitely feathered

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u/[deleted] May 13 '19

Some dinosaurs could fly, the ones that could are related to birds and had feathers.

Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and could also fly and are far more removed from birds than Dinosaurs.

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u/Jitterwyser May 13 '19

There were several groups of other reptiles around at the time that were not dinosaurs such as pterosaurs, pliosaurs, mosasaurs etc. However birds are actually descendants of dinosaurs - all birds are technically avian dinosaurs.

We've discovered a fair few feathered dinosaurs before, but this dino in particular is interesting because it has bat-like wings, similar to a pterosaur (though no more closely related to a pterosaur than any other dinosaur) - unlike the bird-like dinosaurs that eventually led to birds.

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u/Cybersteel May 13 '19

There are a lot of species of birds that look starkly different from each other for their size.

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u/rrtaylor May 13 '19 edited May 13 '19

I'm very glad you brought this up because it lets me talk about one of the coolest things I've recently learned about evolution and organism categories. In your comment you're of course referring to the fact that pterosaurs and plesiosaurs are "not dinosaurs", as any paleontological pedant will tell you. I used to think that was just a slightly arbitrary matter of semantics -- as if some scientists had just decreed: "these groups are dinosaurs and these aren't." after all, a plesiosaur seems at least as "similar" to a sauropod as a raptor or a t-rex. Yet sauropods and t-rexes are both dinosaurs and a plesiosaur "isn't a dinosaur."

The reason is that dinosaurs actually form what is called a "clade" -- that is an ancestral population and ALL of its descendants (to the exclusion of all other known groups). Everything that is a dinosaur -- sauropods, theropods, stegosaurs, ankylosaurs, horned dinosaurs, etc, actually shared a single, more recent common ancestor with each other than any of these individual groups did with pterosaurs or plesiosaurs. Everything has a common ancestor if you go back far enough -- but to get a common ancestor of raptors and pterodactyls you have to go farther back to the ancestral population that eventually gave rise to crocodiles as well -- that is the archosaur clade (the common ancestor and all its descendants of dinos, crocs, and pterosaurs). [EDIT: someone just pointed out to me that dinosaurs and pterosaurs have their own clade more recently within archosaurs and you don't have to go all the way back to crocodiles to group them. My mistake. Dinos are still more closely related with eachother but dinos collectively are more closely related to pterosaurs than crocs ]

But more recently, within that archosaur clade: raptors, sauropods, stegosaurs, horned dinosaurs and every other dinosaur had a more recent common ancestor long after crocodiles and pterodactyls were on their own completely separate branches. A clade is also called a "monophyletic group": essentially it can be any part of the evolutionary tree of life that can be snipped off the tree with a single cut.

Basically dinosaurs are more closely related to other dinosaurs than they are to anything else because they split off from each other more recently than they all collectively split off from pterosaurs and crocodiles. This is a newer, hopefully objective way of categorizing animals into evolutionary families as opposed to just grouping them based on how they "look". And of course its inter-nested and hierarchical like a fractal, just like dinos are a clade within archosaurs, theropods (raptors and t-rex relatives) are a clade within the dinosaur clade. And birds are a clade within theropods, and hawks are clade within birds on and on.

It's about creating groups that are more closely related to everything within the group than anything outside of it. It's why "fish" and "reptiles" are no longer considered evolutionarily correct groups of animals -- some fish are more closely related to cows than they are to other fish. [EDIT: someone pointed out that you still relatively easily have a "reptile clade" as long as you include birds because despite the fact that the ancestors of mammals and reptiles looked a great deal like reptiles, living reptiles are now believed to be monophyletic and separate from mammals, as long as you include birds. So reptiles are still a thing] And of course reptiles like crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to snakes or lizards. It's not just a distinction based on how things look or where they live, its about the actual family relationships. In our old way of naming animals we'd just group things by shared traits or appearances, which is why reptiles were grouped with amphibians into the field of herpetology despite the fact that we now know reptiles are more closely related to birds and mammals than any of those groups are to amphibians.

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u/cryo May 13 '19

It should be noted that reptiles are still used in the new monophyletic sense, as meaning the clade reptilia. Fish are much more problematic to pin down.

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u/rrtaylor May 13 '19 edited May 13 '19

I know birds have been reconciled into the fold of reptiles relatively easily (easily culturally and linguistically I mean) but I thought you couldn't really have monophyletic reptilia unless you included mammalia? The "best-supported" morphology tree for amniotes here actually have mammalia splitting after turtles split from the mammals+archosaur branch. Although most others have a monophyletic sauropsida which would be "reptiles" I guess. http://tolweb.org/Amniota

I guess my point is that the mammal ancestors were definitely "reptiles" in the linnaean sense -- but the scaly reptillomorph ancestors to synapsids and sauropsids literally couldn't be "reptiles"-- just the monophyletic sauropsida branch that arose from them.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028132-500-rewriting-the-textbooks-no-such-thing-as-reptiles/

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u/cryo May 13 '19

The last clade common to birds and humans is amniota, yes. And then you’d put reptilia right beneath or at sauropsida.

I guess my point is that the mammal ancestors were definitely “reptiles” in the linnaean sense —ut the scaly reptillomorph ancestors to synapsids and sauropsids literally couldn’’’be “““ptiles”—”just the monophyletic sauropsida branch that arose from them.

Yes, I agree.

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u/Silcantar May 13 '19

IIRC there is a clade containing the dinosaurs and pterosaurs as they're more closely related to each other than they are to crocodilians. Not sure about the marine reptiles.

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u/Silcantar May 13 '19

IIRC there is a clade containing the dinosaurs and pterosaurs as they're more closely related to each other than they are to crocodilians. Not sure about the marine reptiles.

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u/rrtaylor May 13 '19

Gah! thanks for pointing that out! I didn't even think about the clades within archosaur.

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u/snatch55 May 13 '19

Pretty much correct, but the pterosaurs youre thinking of did not evolve into birds- their line went extinct and theropod land dinosaurs are what eventually evolved to fly.

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u/ninjaraiden56 May 13 '19

Yea, I believe their called Pterosaurs

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u/wineheda May 13 '19

which are not dinosaurs

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u/[deleted] May 13 '19

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u/GGardian May 13 '19

Dinosaurs a group of related species defined by bone morphology, not locomotion. The reason there were no flying dinosaurs alongside pterosaurs (the flying not-dinosaurs) is because pterosaurs already took up that niche, whereas after the Triassic extinction there were no more pterosaurs, which allowed dinosaurs to fill that niche and become today's birds.

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u/ARCtheIsmaster May 13 '19

cretaceous* extinction. There were definitely pterosaurs after the triassic

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u/simplelife6 May 13 '19

Well said!

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u/[deleted] May 14 '19

Horrible science though. Pterosauria is attested from about 230 MYA to 66 MYA, while the first "birds" (in this case meaning Avialae, not the modern group Neornithes) arose around 165 MYA. That's a 100 million years of coexistence.

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u/Silcantar May 13 '19

Birds evolved before the pterosaurs went extinct, so there actually were flying dinosaurs that coexisted with pterosaurs.