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| Norellraptor barsboldi |
Yet some of the most revealing discoveries arrive on a much smaller scale.
While I imagine it would go horribly wrong, I still cannot get over the charm of this cutie and the wonderfully disarming notion of a dinosaur small enough to hold in your arms.
Meet Norellraptor barsboldi, a newly described feathered dinosaur from northeastern China.
Its remarkably complete skeleton measures just 57 centimetres long—roughly the length of a small Common Raven, though with very different proportions—and parts of its plumage remain preserved alongside the bones.
Here is an animal whose delicate remains give us a peek at one of evolution’s most extraordinary achievements: flight.
Published in Nature Communications on 29 September 2026, the new research adds another branch to a story that grows more interesting with every feathered fossil.
The question is how different dinosaur lineages assembled the anatomical features associated with taking to the air.
Norellraptor belonged to the microraptorines, small predatory dinosaurs closely related to birds.
Its fossil comes from the Lower Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation in Liaoning, China—a province celebrated for its jade carvings, which also holds extraordinary treasures in its fossil beds.
Members of this group are famous for an unusual arrangement: some carried long feathers on both their arms and legs, creating the possibility of several aerodynamic surfaces.
Try imagining that silhouette. A small dinosaur with feathered limbs and a long tail looks very different from the familiar outline of a sparrow. It invites an artist’s curiosity, but also a scientist’s questions.
How were those limbs positioned? What could the feathers do? How much can a flattened fossil tell us about an animal moving through three-dimensional space?
Those questions make the distinction between evidence and reconstruction especially valuable. Preserved feathers give us something tangible to study. Reconstructing how the whole animal moved requires further interpretation.
The research team examined both the skeleton and the microscopic structure of a forelimb bone. They tell us that this individual was at least three years old when it died. But how did they know? An excellent question. Fossils can preserve more than an outline; the tissues inside its bones can also hold clues to its growth.
The larger finding emerged when the team compared evolutionary changes in microraptorines with those in the bird lineage.
Around 30 per cent of the anatomical features identified as evolutionary innovations in microraptorines also appeared independently along the bird branch. Crucially, the shared features emerged in different sequences.
Imagine finding two complicated machines with several similar components. Their resemblance alone cannot tell you whether they were assembled through the same process. You would also want to know when each component appeared and how it worked with the parts already present.
The study supports the interpretation that different evolutionary pressures helped shape flight-related adaptations in these closely related groups. Similarities between them need not all represent a single inherited package of aerial abilities.
It is an enticing result, though further fossils and evidence of bone growth will be needed to test how widely this pattern applies. Norellraptor contributes to the discussion rather than closing it.
That is part of what I love about palaeontology. Each discovery gives us another opportunity to replace a tidy picture with a richer one. Evolution has no obligation to follow the clean sequence we might choose for a museum wall. Its history is branching, and fossils allow us to examine those branches one extraordinary specimen at a time.
Personally, while I am excited by the fossil bones they found, it is the feathers that steal my heart. It will be very exciting to see what we learn from them.
A feathered fossil in stone and a bird outside the window belong to the same unfolding conversation. One helps us ask how aerial adaptations arose. The other lets us watch what one surviving branch can do.
There is a lovely way to carry this story into the present. Watch a crow settle onto a branch, a gull adjust its wings above the shoreline, or a small songbird disappear into the trees. Living birds are dinosaurs, carrying that deep evolutionary history into our everyday world.
Each makes the larger story wonderfully immediate.
