Flying Mammals Lived With Dinos

A new fossil discovery of China demonstrates that a very small one squirrel-like creature slid through air during the age of dinosaurios, than 75 million years more previous that the scientists had documented that capacity in a mammal. The creature could even have beaten birds in the air. Like squirrels of today of the flight, she stretched a hairy membrane between his members to provide a sustenation surface to slide after she jumped of a tree. But she is not related to any thing that lives today. The scientists do not know exactly when the animal lived. Their rest could anywhere be from 130 million a 164 million years, said to Jin Meng of the American museum of natural history. It and the colleagues of Beijing disclose the discovery in the application of Thursday the nature of the newspaper.

She is so clearly older than the million-year-old wood 51 that was the oldest evidence of the flight or the sliding in a mammal. And he has an occasion to precede the known bird more early, Archaeopteryx, that flew near ago 150 million years. He is much more young that the reptiles of the flight called pterosaurs, which they have been old fashioned to start off for of 230 million years. However, added to a recent finding in he himself locale in China of the northeast that revealed semi-aquatic creature, the discovery demonstrates that the early mammals were varied much more who the earth-affectionate scientists of the creatures have anticipated traditionally, Meng this. It and the colleagues doubled antiquus animal of Volaticotherium, that is Latin and the Greek for the ?old beast of the flight (or been flying).? Think that he was night, as other mammals of the time were thought to be, and as mammalian of sliding it is today. It was the size of a squirrel or a wood - less than three ounces of the flight. Its stiff tail could have been longer than the trunk of its body. The finding includes not only the bones, but also the impressions to the rock left that reveal the hairy membrane the creature used to slide.

Their teeth demonstrate it that it ate the insects mainly, investigators this. But it could not probably look for insects whereas one slid because he was a too clumsy aviator and it could not remain sufficiently long airborne, the investigators this. So because sliding? He is hard to draw the conclusions for this creature, Meng specifically said, but the scientists think generally that the sliding is a way energy saving to be able of tree to the tree, compared in several occasions to raise above and under trunks. The sliding increased probably range of the forage of the creature perhaps and it helped you to save predators in the trees, he said. Larry Heaney, guardian of mammals in the museum of the field in Chicago that has studied of sliding length mammalian, said that the new creature ?has taken the first measurement? towards flight driven like exposed objects from a wood. But of its anatomy, ?Heaney would say that this animal was not probably very distant throughout the trajectory truth flight,? this. ?It was not in the way to the classes of modifications that we see in the woods that allow that they really fly.? Meng said that it is not clear if the descendants of the creature gained the capacity to fly.