Holy bat-cester! It’s a fossilized furry flier! Mammal pushes timeline way back.

Discovery of prehistoric gliding mammals

By Malcolm Ritter

Associated Press   NEW YORK

During the age of dinosaurs, tiny squirrel-like creatures climbed trees and jumped into the darkness. Then they spread their limbs and glided away — the first known mammals to take to the air, a new report says. (How in anyone’s stretch of imagination could anyone know this? What did the tiny creature do?...Was he sitting around one day and said to himself, “self, what do you suppose these limbs are for? I think I will invent gliding” So he jumped into the darkness just to see what happened!  Did one bat do it and the rest copy it or did they make a collective decision?)   The natural reply to that is, “all animals have instincts” WHERE DO YOU SUPPOSE THEY GOT THEM?! One day their instincts said, “see if you can glide?”

The species is revealed by a fossil found in north eastern China, which pushes the known history of mammalian gliding or flying back by more than 75 million years.

The creature may have even beaten birds into the air. ( So, one day some birds—only they didn’t know they were birds—were sitting around and the saw the “gliders” going from tree to tree. They looked at each other and got all excited and started clapping their hands and since they didn’t know they were wings, when started to clap, their bodies lifted off the ground and they were in flight, and they said, “Look! Look! We are flying” And ever after that they learned to fly by falling out of their nests because now they built nest in trees instead of on the ground.

Like today’s flying squirrels, it stretched a furry membrane between its limbs to provide an airfoil for gliding after it jumped from a tree. But it’s not related to anything living today. ( They are related to themselves!! For crying out loud! If they are not related to any living thing today, what’s the purpose of this so called “discovery?”)

Its remains could be anywhere from 130 million to 164 million years old, said Jin Meng of the American Museum of Natural History. He and colleagues from Beijing report the Inner Mongolia fossil discovery in today’s issue of Nature.

So it’s clearly older than the 51 million-year- old bat that used to be the oldest evidence of flying or gliding in a mammal. And it has a chance of preceding the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, which flew about 150 million years ago. Who kept those records then?

It is much younger than flying reptiles called pterosaurs, which are dated from 230 million years ago.

Meng and colleagues dubbed the animal Volaticotherium antiquus, which is Latin and Greek for “ancient flying (or winged) beast.”

They believe it was nocturnal, like other mammals of the time were thought to be, (On what basis were they thought to be nocturnal?) and like gliding mammals are today. It was the size of a flying squirrel or a bat — less than three ounces. Its stiff tail might have been longer than the trunk of its body.

• The find includes not only bones, but also impressions left in rock that reveal the furry membrane the creature used for gliding.

Its teeth show it ate mostly insects, researchers said. But it probably couldn’t hunt insects while gliding because it was too clumsy a flier and couldn’t stay airborne long enough, researchers said.

So why glide? It’s hard to draw conclusions for this creature specifically, Meng said, but in general, scientists think that gliding is an energy- saving way to get from tree to tree, compared to repeatedly climbing up and down trunks. Gliding probably increased the foraging range of the creature and maybe helped it escape predators in the trees, he said. (Again, How did it learn to glide? Did one of them fall out of a tree and “glide”? How did it communicate it to the others and indeed, did it even know what happened?)

Larry Leaney, curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago who has long studied gliding mammals, said the new creature “has taken the first step” toward powered flight such as what a bat exhibits. (Bats have never changed what they do. They still fly like bats.)

But from its anatomy, “I would say this animal probably was not very far along the path to true flight,” Heaney said. “It was not on the road to the kinds of modifications we see in bats that allow them to actually fly.”

Meng said it’s not clear whether descendants of the creature gained the ability to fly. (If it’s not clear whether descendents learned to fly, how can modern bats be descended from them?!)

So, if a bat was lucky enough to fall out of a tree with it’s “batwings” open, it glided but if it didn’t, the fall killed it. When any living thing falls it automatically spread its limbs to catch itself!

My problem is that I recognize the incredible effort these explorers and researchers put out and am grateful to them, but why do they always try to prove there is no God, Creator? Why don’t they put their effort into finding the link TO Him as opposed to trying to prove all this “just happened?” It boggles my mind that as brilliant as these people are they hold onto the idea that somehow there is no first cause even though they know that there has to be a first cause. I don’t care if they ever subscribe to any belief, but simply look around at the incredible order of all things and seek for the source!