Question 1

How do you say Yi qi?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi is pronounced YEE chee. The first word rhymes with 'me' and the second rhymes with 'we.' The name comes from Mandarin Chinese, where tones matter, but for English speakers saying YEE chee sounds correct enough. A good memory trick: think of 'yee-haw' crossed with 'cheese,' smash them together as YEE CHEE, and you have it. Once you know the trick, Yi qi becomes one of the easiest dinosaur names to pronounce.

Question 2

What does Yi qi mean?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi means strange wing in Mandarin Chinese. The genus name Yi (written 翼 in Chinese characters) means wing, and the species name qi (written 奇) means strange or unusual. Scientists chose this name because Yi qi had the most unusual wings of any dinosaur ever discovered: bat-like skin membranes held up by a unique wrist bone found in no other bird or dinosaur on Earth. The two-word name is a direct and perfectly accurate description of the animal's most defining feature.

Question 3

What kind of dinosaur is Yi qi?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi is a small paravian dinosaur belonging to a group called Scansoriopterygidae, a family of agile tree-climbing dinosaurs from Jurassic China. Scansoriopterygids were not direct ancestors of modern birds but instead represent a separate branch of the dinosaur family tree that evolved on its own path and eventually went extinct. Yi qi was about the size of a pigeon, covered in body feathers, and famous for having bat-like membrane wings unlike any other dinosaur known to science.

Question 4

Did Yi qi really have bat wings?

Accepted Answer

Yes, really! Yi qi had wings made of thin skin membrane stretched between its body and arms, strikingly similar to a bat's wings. But Yi qi was not related to bats in any way. The wing membrane was held up by a unique rod-like bone at the wrist called the styliform element, a bone never found in any other bird or dinosaur. Scientists think Yi qi used these wings primarily to glide between trees, similar to a flying squirrel, rather than to sustain powered flapping flight the way modern birds do.

Question 5

How big was Yi qi?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi was small, roughly the size and weight of a pigeon. Its body was about 12 inches (30 cm) in length, and its wingspan was approximately 24 inches (60 cm). It weighed around 380 grams, roughly the same as a can of soup. For a Jurassic dinosaur, it was tiny, but its bizarre wings and completely unique body plan made it anything but ordinary. Among all the feathered dinosaurs known from the Tiaojishan Formation, Yi qi stood out as one of the most visually unusual.

Question 6

What did Yi qi eat?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi was almost certainly an insect eater, though it may have also caught small lizards and other tiny prey. Its small, pointed teeth were well designed for snatching insects from tree bark or grabbing them out of the air during a glide. The Tiaojishan forest of Late Jurassic China was packed with insects, giving Yi qi plenty of food options. At only around 380 grams, it did not need enormous meals, just frequent ones to fuel its active, tree-climbing, gliding lifestyle.

Question 7

When did Yi qi live?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi lived approximately 160 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period. This was tens of millions of years before T. rex and Triceratops, which lived around 66 to 68 million years ago. In Yi qi's time, the continents looked very different from today, the world was warm and lush with no polar ice caps, and giant sauropod dinosaurs lumbered through forests while pterosaurs ruled the open skies. Small feathered dinosaurs like Yi qi scrambled through the treetops of what is now Asia.

Question 8

Where was Yi qi found?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi was found in Hebei Province in northeastern China, preserved in a rock formation called the Tiaojishan Formation. This formation is famous among paleontologists for its extraordinary preservation of feathered dinosaurs, early birds, insects, and plants from the Late Jurassic period. The fossil eventually reached scientists at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, who formally described and named it to the world in 2015 in the journal Nature.

Question 9

Is Yi qi a bird?

Accepted Answer

No, Yi qi was not a bird, even though it could glide. It belonged to Scansoriopterygidae, a group that evolved on a completely separate branch of the dinosaur family tree from the lineage that produced modern birds. Birds descended from a different group of feathered theropods entirely. Yi qi's bat-like skin membrane wings are also completely different from the feathered wings of birds, and Yi qi left no living descendants. It represents an extinct experiment in aerial locomotion that eventually vanished from the Earth.

Question 10

Could Yi qi actually fly?

Accepted Answer

Most scientists think Yi qi was primarily a glider rather than a powered flier. Studies of its wing shape, bone structure, and estimated muscle mass suggest it could spread its wings and coast on air currents but probably could not flap hard enough to sustain the kind of powered, directional flight that modern birds use. Think of it more like a flying squirrel than a hawk. Yi qi most likely launched itself from high branches and glided down to lower branches or the forest floor, using its wing membrane to control direction and slow its descent.

Question 11

Who discovered Yi qi?

Accepted Answer

Yi qi was formally described and named by Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing and his colleagues at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China. Their scientific paper was published in the journal Nature on April 29, 2015. Xu Xing is one of the most prolific dinosaur describers in history, having formally named dozens of new species throughout his career. The fossil specimen itself came from the Tiaojishan Formation in Hebei Province, China.

Question 12

Why does Yi qi have such a short name?

Accepted Answer

Yi is one of the shortest genus names ever given to any living thing in the history of science, just two letters long. Most dinosaur genus names come from long Greek or Latin compound words that are notoriously difficult to spell. Xu Xing and his team deliberately chose a short Mandarin Chinese name to honor the Chinese origin of the fossil and to make the animal instantly memorable. The full name Yi qi is just four letters total, and that brevity itself became part of what made Yi qi famous among dinosaur fans and scientists around the world.

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