If the last blog post on feathered velociraptors caught your interest, you might be interested in the question we’re asking today. It’s a question that is often on the mind of palaeontologists (scientists who study dinosaurs and other extinct creatures): Did feathered dinosaurs glide or did they actually fly like birds do, by flapping their wings?  Of course, we’re not talking about velociraptors and other dinosaurs that just had a few feathers here. We’re talking about small dinosaurs a few feet long that were covered in feathers and soared through the air…at least so we think.

Luckily, new research may have an answer to the flying dinosaur question. Scientists have new idea about how a certain dinosaur used its wings. This dinosaur is called Microraptor mui. It was about 3 feet in length and lived in China millions of years ago. But it left its fossilized feathers and bones behind. Fast forward to the present… Scientists in the 21st century have looked at the fossils. And they’ve noticed that the tiny dinosaur had a second set of “wings” that consisted of long feathers on their legs and feet. This would have made it difficult for them to get around on the ground (Colonel Sanders would have caught them pretty quickly)! But researchers think that they stayed in the trees all the time. When they wanted to get to another tree, they dropped their legs and used them like a lower set of wings that helped them glide from tree to tree. Have you ever seen an old-fashioned airplane or stunt airplane with two sets of wings, one upper and one lower? That’s pretty much what this dinosaur looked like when it glided.