Early Start
On water, on land and in the air - mammals feel at home everywhere. So far, however, the thesis has been that they acquired the skills of flying quite late. A small creature from the Mesozoic belies this view.
Some achievements are so good that they are invented more than once. This includes gliding, for example. After all, this type of locomotion not only saves a lot of energy, it also enables you to escape quickly from any evil enemies and can also open up new food resources at dizzy heights. No wonder that in nature not only insects and birds, but also mammals tried to conquer this habitat.
Representatives of four different mammalian orders have made this leap at least seven times. The bats with bats and flying foxes are the first group to master the airy element brilliantly. In the early Eocene, about 50 million years ago, the oldest fossils of these acrobats to date appear.
It wasn't until 20 million years later, in the late Oligocene, that rodents followed suit and created sailing creatures like the flying squirrel. Independently of them, small mammals such as the giant glider or the glider possum took to the air. This makes it clear that mammalian flight was a late Cenozoic invention.
Until now. Because now scientists from the USA and China have discovered a small fossil that does not want to fit into the picture of the long earth connection of mammals. The animal unearthed near Daohugou in China's Inner Mongolia, with a body length of 12 to 14 centimeters and a weight of around 70 grams, was not exactly impressive in size. However, a structure that the researchers were able to identify between the front and rear extremities of the fossil appears all the more unusual. Jin Meng from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and his colleagues are certain that this is a wing skin – i.e. a flap of skin that has been converted into a wing and whose buoyancy properties are also trusted by bats and flying squirrels.
With an age of 125 million years, however, the creature comes from a completely different time than the oldest fluttering animals: the Mesozoic. At that time, at the transition between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous period, the dinosaurs ruled over land, water and air; the first birds were still circling uncertainly; the few mammals were content with a small niche existence.
The luck of founding a new order comes only once in the life of a mammalian paleontologist
(Jin Meng) The find is so unusual for the researchers that they placed the newly named creature Volaticotherium antiquus (roughly "ancient flying animal") in a newly created order called Volaticotheria."The chance of founding a new order comes only once - if ever - in the life of a mammalian paleontologist," Meng comments on this unusual step.
How far Volaticotherium antiquus mastered the art of flight remains uncertain. The low body weight and the relatively large wing suggest an agile gliding flight, but it was probably not enough for sophisticated maneuvers when catching insects. The researchers were able to tell from its pointed, sharp teeth that the animal – in contrast to the more vegetarian flying squirrels – mainly fed on insects. Presumably, it would climb trees after its prey, using its wing skin only when needed.
Be that as it may, some small mammals appear to have learned the art of gliding at least 70 million years earlier, independently of bats and other flapping creatures, the researchers point out."They were experimenting with aquatic life at about the same time - if not earlier - as birds were scrambling to conquer the skies." Some achievements are so good that they are invented more than once.
