xoxoxoBruce • Aug 19, 2017 11:04 pm
There’s all manner of critters that fly, birds, insects, but not mammals except the Bat.
But there are reptiles like snakes and frogs as well as mammals that glide. The oldest gliding mammals, discovered in China,
were gliding 160 million years ago, when T-Rex was a road hazard.
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But there are reptiles like snakes and frogs as well as mammals that glide. The oldest gliding mammals, discovered in China,
were gliding 160 million years ago, when T-Rex was a road hazard.
Maiopatagium furculiferum and Vilevolodon diplomylos were both small, furry mammals well-adapted to an arboreal lifestyle. The fossils are so well preserved that paleontologists could observe a tell-tale fringe of skin and fur around their bodies, similar to the membranes used by sugar gliders and flying squirrels to float through the air. Lengthened fingers allowed them to hang like bats from tree branches, and their gliding membranes, called patagium, gave the ancient mammals the ability to move from tree to tree without ever touching the ground.
Both fossils belong to a group of ancestral mammals that have long been extinct. As such, there is no line connecting them to gliding mammals today, indicating that mammalian aerial skills disappeared and re-emerged at least once throughout history
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