A tiny flying dinosaur reptile* has been unearthed by palaeontologists working in China. This new species of pterosaur has a wingspan of just 25 centimetres, making it one of the smallest ever found.

As Wired notes, “to judge by the illustrated rendition, it was very adorable”. The NY Times agrees, calling it “the cutest little 120-million-year-old flying reptile you could ever hope to see”

It’s not clear how big and how ugly the thing would have got if it had stayed alive a bit longer. Study author Xiaolin Wang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, notes in the PNAS paper presenting the animal that it has several features indicating it is not fully grown. For instance some of its cranial bones are unfused.

However Wang insists it is not a hatchling just out of the egg, in part because several bones which are generally fragile in juveniles are well preserved. Named Nemicolopterus crypticus, the fossil was unearthed in western Liaoning, in the East of China.

The new species is also interesting because it seems to be adapted for living in trees. This is inferred from its claws and toe bones, which appear to be adapted to hanging on to branches.

“The fundamental importance of this discovery is that it opens a new chapter in the history of evolution of flying reptiles. Until now, it was unknown that some of these animals had these adaptations to live on tree canopies,” says co-author Alexander Kellner, of the Rio de Janeiro Federal University’s National Museum (BBC).

As the Guardian notes, this new species isn’t quite the smallest pterosaur ever. A hatchling found in Germany has a wingspan of just 18 centimetres.

*see comment below.

Image top: reconstruction of Nemicolopterus crypticus / courtesy of Michael Skrepnickaption.

Map: courtesy of PNAS/National Academy of Sciences