A remarkable and near-complete feathered dinosaur fossil discovered in China has many of the same adaptations for flight found in birds, but probably evolved them independently.

The 57-centimetre-long fossil is between 100 million and 145 million years old, and was discovered by a farmer near the town of Lamadong in Liaoning, China.

It was donated to a museum at Hebei GEO University in 2023, where Ji Qiang and his colleagues examined the exquisitely preserved specimen, complete with plumage, teeth, wings and articulated spine.

The researchers determined that the dinosaur was a new species, which they named Norellraptor barsboldi in honour of palaeontologists Mark Allen Norell and Rinchen Barsbold. It belongs in a group of small dinosaurs with both feathers and wings known as microraptorines.

Ji and his colleagues think the specimen was a young adult, aged at least 3 years old when it died, and that its feathers may have been associated with flight.

It also had a long tail like , the Jurassic dinosaur regarded as an early representative of the dinosaur lineage that gave rise to birds.

Although birds and microraptorine dinosaurs share several flight-related adaptations, such as shortened and fused bones in the wings, Ji and his colleagues propose that these adaptations weren’t inherited from a common ancestor.

Based on evolutionary relationships, the researchers found that around 30 per cent of anatomical changes in microraptorines also evolved in the bird lineage, but in a different order, providing evidence that the two groups evolved flight separately and for different reasons.

Jacqueline Nguyen at the Australian Museum in Sydney says discoveries of feathered dinosaurs over the past three decades, particularly fossils from China, have transformed our understanding of the origin of birds and how they evolved flight.

While the new bird-like dinosaur shares many anatomical similarities with birds, there are also important differences, she says. “Its forelimb growth pattern is quite different from that of living birds.”

Analyses of N. barsboldi’s bone microstructure, its growth patterns and its evolutionary relationships show that the evolutionary sequences leading to flight adaptations in living birds and in bird-like dinosaurs were quite different, says Nguyen. “This is interesting, because it shows that the evolutionary path to flight was not just a linear one, but that these evolutionary innovations appeared independently.”