The dinosaur, a mere 2 feet long (70 centimeters) and weighing the equivalent of two cans of soda, roamed the Earth 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous period (between 146 and 65 million years ago).

"This specimen shows that dinosaurs evolved small size earlier than we previously thought," said study team member Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Flight factors

A prerequisite for flight is the ability to lift one's body off the ground. So for dinosaurs to take to the skies, they first had to "lose some weight." But did already-small dinosaurs shrink further in size after they took to the air and became birds? Or did they first shrink in size before they could fly?

Paleontologists had previously assumed it was the first scenario that occurred, but the new finding, detailed in the Sept. 7 issue of the journal Science, suggests otherwise.

"Paleontologists have long thought that miniaturization occurred in the earliest birds, which then facilitated the origin of flight," said lead author Alan Turner, a graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University in New York. "Now, the evidence shows that this decrease in body size occurred well before the origin of birds and that the dinosaurian ancestors of birds were, in a sense, pre-adapted for flight."

Source - LiveScience 

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