About 148 to 150 million years ago, a strange pheasant-sized and bird-like dinosaur with elongated legs and arms built much like wings inhabited southeastern China, with a puzzling anatomy suggesting it either was a fast runner or lived a lifestyle like a modern wading bird.
Scientists said on September 6 they unearthed in Fujian Province the fossil of a Jurassic Period dinosaur they named Fujianvenator prodigiosus - a creature that sheds light on a critical evolutionary stage in the origin of birds.
The question of whether the Fujianvenator, with its curious mixture of skeletal features, should be classified as a bird depends on how one defines a bird, according to study leader Min Wang, a palaeontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
