The 163-million-year-old dinosaur was about the size of a sparrow and was covered in fluffy feathers. But unlike previous fossil dinosaurs with aerodynamic appendages, Yi has thin rods of bone jutting from each wrist. “When I saw the rod-like bone, I was really confused,” says paleontologist Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “There is nothing comparable in any other dinosaur.”
According to Xing and his team, the bony rods on the dinosaur’s wrist likely supported bat-like wings. The discovery, reported today in Nature, joins a growing body of evidence that the direct ancestors of birds weren’t the only dinosaurs taking to the air, and it may add to our understanding of the evolution of flight. Not to mention that a dinosaur that may have swooped around like Batman is just plain cool.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
