New species of dinosaur, a cousin of Velociraptor, probably glided on four “wings” and hunted early birds

Field Museum

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

The new microraptor dinosaur Jian changmaensis (left) attacks the early bird Gansus yumenensis (right) in what is now the Changma Basin of northwestern China approximately 120 million years ago. Credits: illustration by Lewis LaRosa, colorized by Jão Canola.

view more 

Credit: Credits: illustration by Lewis LaRosa, colorized by Jão Canola.

A fossil bed in northwestern China is littered with the remains of hundreds of prehistoric birds—including some whose broken bones were crushed into pellets, similar to those coughed up by modern owls. For years, scientists guessed that a larger predatory animal must have hunted these ancient birds, but they never found direct fossil evidence of this predator. But in a new paper published in the Annals of Carnegie Museum, researchers announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur from this fossil bed—a cousin of Velociraptor with long feathers on its front and back limbs. Based on the dinosaur’s distinctive arm and shoulder bones, scientists hypothesize that this animal is the missing predator.

“Scientists have found these weird, broken-up clusters of bird bones at this site, and we didn’t know what made them. This new microraptor dinosaur, Jian changmaensis, is our best guess,” says Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago and senior author of the paper describing the new species. “It’s the only dinosaur found at this site that wasn’t a bird, it was a carnivore, and it was much bigger than everything else that we’ve found there.”

Modern birds are the only group of dinosaurs that survived the after-effects of a meteorite hitting the Earth 66 million years ago. But birds and their fellow dinosaurs lived together for tens of millions of years in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. One group of dinosaurs, the dromaeosaurs, were close cousins of the bird-dinosaurs. Dromaeosaurs, like birds, were covered in feathers and tended to be relatively small and speedy. The Velociraptors made famous in Jurassic Park are probably the most famous dromaeosaurs (but they would have been smaller and more feathery than they're depicted in the movies).

The new species, Jian changmaensis, belongs to a clade within the dromaeosaur family called microraptors. Microraptors tended to be small; the most well-known species is about the size of a crow. “Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found,” says O’Connor. “The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot wingspan, around the size of a barn owl.”

And while scientists only have Jian’s arm, they suspect that Jian, like its fellow microraptors, had long feathers on both its arms and its legs, giving it the appearance of having four “wings” that it used to glide. “Jian and the other microraptors probably weren’t capable of true, powered flight, but they could probably glide like a flying squirrel,” says O’Connor.

The new dinosaur’s name, Jian changmaensis, is a reference to its bird-like appearance and its place of origin. Jian is a winged creature in Chinese mythology, and the fossil was found in the Changma Basin in China’s Gansu province.

“Jian changmaensis reveals that non-avian dinosaurs lived in what is now the Changma Basin, an area famous for its fossil birds,” says Matt Lamanna, corresponding author of the study and  Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Mary R. Dawson Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and senior dinosaur researcher. “Our team has recovered more than a hundred bird fossils at Changma, but only this single non-avian dinosaur specimen. Jian provides critical new insight into the biological history of the Changma region and the ecological context of the ancestors of today’s birds.”

“You cannot understand life on the planet today without looking at its origins,” says O’Connor. “Birds are arguably the most successful group of land-dwelling vertebrate animals on Earth today. Learning about early birds and their close non-bird dinosaur relatives gives us a better understanding of what made the group of birds that survived so special.”

This study was contributed to by Ling-Qi Zhou (Gansu Geological Museum), Matthew Lamanna (Carnegie Museum of Natural History), Ashley Poust (University of Nebraska State Museum and University of California Museum of Paleontology), Da-Qing Li (Gansu Agricultural University), Hai-Lu You (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Jingmai O’Connor (Field Museum).

###

---

 

Figure 2 from Zhou et al paper, showing the arm bones of the new dinosaur Jian.

Credit

Zhou et al

Journal

Annals of Carnegie Museum

Article Title

FIRST NON-AVIAN THEROPOD (DROMAEOSAURIDAE, MICRORAPTORINAE) FROM THE BIRD-BEARING LOWER CRETACEOUS XIAGOU FORMATION OF THE CHANGMA BASIN, GANSU PROVINCE, NORTHWESTERN CHINA

Article Publication Date

4-Jun-2026

 

Rare wild goats in Northumberland, UK found to be genetically unique

Newcastle University

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Cheviot goats

view more 

Credit: Sampurna Roychoudhury

New research shows Cheviot goats are one of the UK’s most genetically distinct goat populations.

Led by Newcastle University, this is the first genetic study to determine the ancestry and genetic health of a UK feral goat population. It provides a genetic assessment of the Cheviot goats in Northumberland’s College Valley, identifying them as a historically significant and genetically distinct population unlike of the other European goat breeds.

The Cheviot goat population centres on a group in the Cheviot Hills in Northumberland. They are believed to be descended from the original goats introduced by the first farmers of the Neolithic period.

Published in the Journal of Heredity, the results show that the Cheviot goats are a genetically distinct breed, compared to other European goat breeds. A comparison with a global dataset of goat breeds, reveals that the Cheviot goats are most closely related to Irish goat breeds.

The genetic analysis shows that, contrary to expectations, the Cheviot population is an isolated remnant of the British Primitive Goat breed, which has not crossbred with other goats at all. The scientists also found that the population has low genetic diversity and is highly inbred, because of its small population size due to past culling practices.

The findings highlight the potential importance of native and feral livestock breeds as animal genetic resources for future agriculture, particularly in improving disease resistance, strengthening genetic diversity and supporting adaptation to climate change.

Study lead author, Dale Decena, a Master’s student at Newcastle University’s School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, said: “Feral goats across the UK including the Cheviot goats are an often overlooked and unique aspect of UK biodiversity. They continue to represent an important link to the historical and cultural heritage of many local communities – yet we know little about them. Locally adapted breeds in small, isolated populations like the Cheviot goats are particularly prone to genomic erosion (the loss of genetic diversity) and so future work should consider incorporating genetic information to enable effective decision-making in future breed conservation strategies.”

Dr Richard Bevan, another of the study authors, added: “The origins of the Cheviot goats have been debated for many years, and it is so good to finally set the record straight. We now need to investigate the genetic makeup of other feral goat populations in the UK, and perhaps discover new mysteries.”

The authors indicate that the Cheviot goats’ resilience offers valuable and rare opportunity to investigate genetic signatures of natural selection. They call for further studies of other feral goat populations across the UK to guide conservation and long-term population management strategies.

Reference

Lorenz Dale Decena, Richard M Bevan, Jodie Brown, Vlatka Cubric-Curik, Aileen C Mill, Evelyn L Jensen, Old goats, new insights: Origins and genetic diversity of feral Cheviot goats, Journal of Heredity, 2026;, esag044, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esag044

A Cheviot goat

Credit

Sampurna Roychoudhury

--ends--

---

Journal

Journal of Heredity

DOI

10.1093/jhered/esag044 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Article Title

Old goats, new insights: Origins and genetic diversity of feral Cheviot goats

 

The best pollinators can drive evolutionary changes in flowers, new study finds

Researchers find hummingbirds to be better pollinators of mountain flowers than bees, prompting the plants to adopt traits that favor the fast, feathered carriers over the fuzzy, buzzy ones

University of California - Santa Cruz

LinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

A female green hermit hummingbird hovers over a tropical species of spiral ginger in Las Alturas, Costa Rica.

view more 

Credit: Pedro Juárez

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – A new study by plant biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, challenges a longstanding idea that stems from the large number of flowers in the mountains of Central and South America that have evolved to be pollinated by hummingbirds instead of bees. According to the research team, flowers make this switch—not because bees avoid cool, wet cloud forest conditions at higher elevations—but because hummingbirds are simply more effective pollinators.

Studying two closely related tropical plant species in Costa Rica, the team found that hummingbirds deliver more pollen per visit than bees—even when bees visit flowers more often. “We’ve assumed for decades that plants switch to hummingbirds because bees drop out at higher elevations in the tropics,” said senior author Kathleen Kay, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “But our results show that’s not necessary. Hummingbirds can drive this transition because they’re better at moving pollen.”

As described in their new study in New Phytologist, the researchers focused on two species of spiral ginger: one pollinated by bees in lowland forests, and a closely related species pollinated by hummingbirds in mountainous cloud forests. To understand what drives this evolutionary shift, the team measured both how often pollinators visit flowers and how much pollen they transfer with each visit.

They also conducted a large field experiment, moving plants across an elevational gradient—from lowland rainforest to cloud forest—to observe how well plants are pollinated outside their usual environments.

Efficiency beats frequency

The results were striking. Bee-pollinated plants received more visits overall, but hummingbird-pollinated plants received more pollen per visit. When the researchers combined these two factors, hummingbirds emerged as the more effective pollinators overall.

Even more surprising, bee visitation did not decline at higher elevations, contradicting the decades-old hypothesis. Instead, hummingbird visitation increased with elevation, further boosting their effectiveness in mountain habitats.

“Bees were still there and visiting flowers, even in the cloud forest,” Kay explained. “What changed was that hummingbirds became even more important—not because bees disappeared, but because hummingbirds were both efficient and more active at higher elevations.”

When a plant shifts from bee to hummingbird pollination, its flowers essentially undergo a  redesign, explained lead author Pedro Juárez, a postdoctoral research fellow at Lund University. A bee-pollinated flower often has a broad landing platform, nectar guides, and scent that help bees find and handle the flower. In contrast, a hummingbird-adapted flower may become smaller, more tubular, and less scented, reflecting a different way of attracting and interacting with pollinators.

“Pollination shifts can help generate new species because flowers adapted to different pollinators may become reproductively isolated from one another,” said Juárez, a Costa Rican who led the field team while he was a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz. “These evolutionary transitions have occurred many times in flowering plants and help explain the remarkable diversity of flowers. However, they are difficult to study directly because we usually discover them only after the shift has already happened.”

The findings of this study suggest that evolutionary shifts may not require the loss of one pollinator group. Instead, even small advantages in efficiency can push plants toward a new evolutionary strategy. Kay added, “Unlike bees, which groom pollen from their bodies to feed their offspring, hummingbirds are focused on nectar and end up transporting more pollen from flower to flower.”

Rethinking evolution

This has broader implications for how scientists understand the evolution of complex traits. Pollination systems involve suites of coordinated characteristics—such as flower shape, color, and scent—that evolve together. The study shows that transitions between these complex trait combinations can occur without dramatic ecological change.

The researchers say their work highlights the importance of looking beyond how often pollinators visit flowers and focusing instead on how effectively they transfer pollen. This perspective could reshape how scientists study plant–pollinator interactions and the origins of new plant species, since adaptation to a new pollinator isolates plants from relatives reliant on the original pollinator.

The study also underscores the ecological importance of hummingbirds in tropical ecosystems, where they may play a key role in shaping plant evolution.

The research was conducted in Costa Rica across multiple field sites spanning lowland rainforest to high-elevation cloud forest and involved years of observation and experimentation. The field team included four UC Santa Cruz undergraduates, highlighting the role of student-led fieldwork in advancing evolutionary biology.

Kathryn Gerhardt was one of them. She graduated in 2023 with a B.S. in ecology and evolutionary biology and said this project was an incredible opportunity to collect ecological data and to experience the beautiful country of Costa Rica and all of its biodiversity in a meaningful way. “Though the field work was the most exciting part,” she said, “it was also rewarding to extract usable data from camera traps and see the paper published.”

---

Journal

New Phytologist

DOI

10.1111/nph.71291 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Pollinator efficiency, rather than bee decline, explains a shift to hummingbird pollination in tropical montane forests

Article Publication Date

4-Jun-2026

 

Dust-prone desert of the southwest may be ideal for solar energy, UTEP study finds

Research points to lower maintenance costs and strong performance outlook for solar facilities near White Sands despite dusty panels

University of Texas at El Paso

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

German Rodriguez Ortiz, a doctoral graduate of UTEP’s Environmental Science and Engineering Program, is the lead author of a study that found solar panels at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo—a region frequently affected by dust storms carrying particles from the White Sands gypsum dune field—lose power output from dust accumulation at a rate far lower than that of solar facilities in comparable desert regions worldwide. The study was published in the journal Atmosphere in April 2026.

view more 

Credit: The University of Texas at El Paso.

EL PASO, Texas (June 4, 2026) – Solar energy developers eyeing parts of southern New Mexico may have less to worry about than expected when it comes to dust. A new study led by University of Texas at El Paso researchers concludes that photovoltaic panels in Alamogordo — a region battered by frequent dust storms carrying particles from the White Sands gypsum dune field — lose only about 2 to 3 percent of their power output to dust accumulation, a rate far lower than that of solar facilities in comparable desert regions worldwide.

The findings, published in the journal Atmosphere in April 2026, carry direct implications for the economics of solar energy in the Chihuahuan Desert, the team said. Because dust-related losses at the study site are modest, and because light rainfall proved sufficient to restore panel performance, operators of solar facilities in the area may be able to clean their panels far less frequently than those at sites in the Middle East, Iran, or China — where soiling losses can reach 10 to 80 percent.

"What we found is that this location is genuinely favorable for solar energy, not just because of its abundant sunshine but because of how the dust behaves here," said German Rodriguez Ortiz, the study's lead author and a doctoral graduate of UTEP's Environmental Science and Engineering Program. "The wind that brings dust from White Sands also helps clean the panels, and the gypsum itself appears to be less harmful to performance than the types of dust studied at other sites globally."

Two natural factors appear to work in the region's favor. Prevailing south-to-southwest winds strike the front face of south-facing panels directly, physically dislodging accumulated particles in a passive cleaning effect. Additionally, rainfall as light as 2.2 millimeters per hour was sufficient to restore panels to near-baseline performance — a lower cleaning threshold than has been documented in California, India and other solar markets. The anti-reflective coating on the panels studied may have contributed to rain's effectiveness, pointing to a potential design consideration for future installations.

The study also found that gypsum — the distinctive mineral blown from White Sands — absorbs less light than other common dust minerals, meaning its optical interference with panel performance is inherently limited. That characteristic, combined with the region's wind patterns and responsiveness to rain, positions the southern Tularosa Basin as a location where the solar resource and the operating environment are better aligned than previously understood, Rodriguez Ortiz said.

These factors lead to a reduced cleaning frequency, which translates into lower water consumption, less labor and meaningfully lower long-term operating costs, the team said.

"This research demonstrates the kind of place-based science UTEP is uniquely positioned to conduct," said Thomas E. Gill, Ph.D., professor of earth, environmental and resource sciences, co-author of the study and Rodriguez Ortiz’s doctoral advisor. "Our location in the Chihuahuan Desert is not just a backdrop — it is a living laboratory, and this work shows how deeply understanding your local environment can generate insights with real economic and energy consequences for the region."

The study was conducted at the United States Bureau of Reclamation's Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, where the team monitored six solar panels across three sampling periods from late 2022 through spring 2024, recording 22 dust events in the process. Co-authors include assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry Jose A. Hernandez-Viezcas, Ph.D.; UTEP researcher Alejandro J. Metta-Magana; and alumna Malynda Cappelle, Ph.D., of the Bureau of Reclamation.

The researchers recommend longer-term monitoring to capture seasonal variation through the summer monsoon and more and less dusty periods, and more detailed investigations into optimal cleaning practices.

About The University of Texas at El Paso

The University of Texas at El Paso is America's leading Hispanic-serving university. Located at the westernmost tip of Texas, where three states and two countries converge along the Rio Grande, 84% of our 26,000 students are Hispanic, and more than half are the first in their families to go to college. With respect to research, UTEP is in the top 5% of universities in America and offers 169 bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree programs at the only open-access, top-tier research university in America.

---

DOI

10.3390/atmos17050442 

Article Title

Experimental Investigation of Photovoltaic Soiling from White Sands Dust in Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA

 

To fight fraud, psychological scientists issue a call to arms

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Association for Psychological Science

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 26, Issue 3)
Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML)

Journalist Charlotte Cowles received a call about suspicious activity on her Amazon account. A dentist named Daniel answered a call from a number listed as the local police. Mr. Lee, a retired engineer, was told he had to marry his newfound girlfriend so she could receive an inheritance.

Though the stories of these fraud victims vary greatly, they each end in the same result—an unsuspecting individual is swindled out of money under false pretenses. In the most recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, these real-life accounts are used to illustrate how pervasive and indiscriminate scams, or fraud (terms the authors use interchangeably), can be.

Scams are now one of the most common crimes in the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, scams accounts for 40% of all reported crimes. A 2024 report from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance states that about half of the world’s population is faced with a scam solicitation at least once a week.

The cost of scams worldwide is estimated to be more than $5 trillion USD a year—roughly equivalent to the combined 2024 budgets for Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. But victims often do not recoup their funds, and for close to 90% of cases, victims do not report that fraud occurred.

In this issue, coauthors Yaniv Hanoch (University of Wolverhampton), Stacey Wood (Scripps College), Marguerite DeLiema (University of Minnesota), Duke Han (University of Southern California), and Peter Lichtenberg (Wayne State University) provide readers with an overview on the latest in fraud research. They also strive to highlight the urgency of fraud’s impact, both to researchers and to individuals beyond academia who can collaborate on direct actions to mitigate it.

“Tackling a widespread and complex phenomenon like fraud is not easy, but as previous examples illustrate, coordinated, cross-sector and multi-modality efforts can dramatically produce social and behavioral change,” the authors wrote. “There is no doubt that psychologists can and should play a vital role in the fight against fraud. This is a call to arms.”

In a commentary accompanying the issue, Jacob Stanley and APS Fellow David Smith of Temple University build on the discussion with a focus on the role of AI. They argue that to understand scams more fully, it is crucial to study them in real time.

“Vulnerability unfolds over time, is amplified by the contexts in which people live and decide, and is increasingly exploited by digital systems designed for speed, scale, and convenience rather than reflection and verification,” they wrote. “If fraud research is to keep pace, it must move beyond static profiles of ‘at-risk’ individuals and toward a richer science of how people, environments, and technologies interact to create exploitable moments.”

References

Hanoch, Y., Wood, St., DeLiema, M., Han, D., & Lichtenberg, P. (2026). The scammers’ psychological warfare: A call to arms. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 0(0).

Stanley, J., & Smith, D. (2026). Fraud in the age of AI: Commentary on the scammers’ psychological warfare. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 0(0).

---

Journal

Psychological Science in the Public Interest

DOI

10.1177/15291006261431553 

Article Title

The Scammers’ Psychological Warfare: A Call to Arms

Article Publication Date

4-Jun-2026