Unusual Dinosaurs from China. . . Yi qi & Shunosaurus

Yi qi & Shunosaurus

This drawing depicts a flying dinosaur and an armored Sauropod.  Both these dinosaurs were found in China.  Both are rather unusual.  Or at least that was considered unusual until more recently.  There is some confusion about this topic.  I mean the topic of flying dinosaurs.

A Pterosaur is a flying reptile that lived at the same time as dinosaurs.  They did NOT have feathers although some or all were covered is a kind of fuzz.  This fuzz was not the fur of mammals.  Pterosaurs did not evolve into birds.  They went extinct.

Flying dinosaurs include Microraptor and several others found in what is now China.  The newest find is almost like a combination of Pterosaurs and flying dinosaurs.  Instead of wing feathers for flying they had a thin section of skin stretched across their arms and fingers..kind of like a bat.  This made for a pretty weird looking animal.  It has a very short name... Yi qi.  Its name means strange wing.  This type of wing is an example of convergent evolution.  Yi qi developed what look much like bat wings even though bats did not evolve for 100 million years later. Since bats evolved the same type of wings and are not related to Yi qi at all... we call this convergent evolution.   Yi qi also had tail feathers like a bird.  It probably lived in trees of the forest.  It lived 160 million years ago.
In this drawing you have to think that the Yi qi is in the foreground.  This is because Yi qi was quite small.  It's wingspan was only about 24 inches or 60 cm.  By the way, the name is pronounced Yee key.

The large dinosaur in the drawing is Shunosaurus.  It was about 31 ft or 9.5 meters long.  It is unique for two reasons.   First, they have found many specimens and so we know like 95% of their skeletal system.  The other unique thing is that it had a weapon on its tail.  It had spiky clubs that could clearly be used to defend against large meat eating Theropod predators.  Shunosaurus was a smaller Theropod and so it was a plant eater.  It lived 170 million years ago.

Both these animals are from the mid Jurassic Period.  Although current fossil evidence puts one ten million years earlier than the other.  Still, I like to think that they might have lived at the same time.  Some species are long lived although I will admit that most don't stick around for more than 3 million years.