“Fire up the B-movietron!” exlaims University of Portsmouth paleontologist Mark Whitton, musing on the discovery of fossils of a weird flying reptile (which he’s also pictured in action, below). The fossils were found in northeastern China, and have been christened Darwinopterus, in honour of the great man’s multiple anniversaries this year.

Why so weird? Well, as Junchang Lu and colleagues report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1603) the crow-sized fossil is a kind of pterosaur (or pterodactyl), one of the flying reptiles that cruised around the sky 220-65 million years ago. It’s a transitional fossil, but transitional in a strangely disjointed way: its head and neck look like they belong to advanced, short-tailed pterosaurs, and the rest of the skeleton is similar to more primitive forms.

“It’s as if someone said, ‘Let’s nail these two together and make a sort of chimera, that’ll really confuse everybody,’” says Dave Unwin of the University of Leicester in England [Science News].

Unwin adds (press release): “The head and neck evolved first, followed later by the body, tail, wings and legs. It seems that natural selection was acting on and changing entire modules and not, as would normally be expected, just on single features such as the shape of the snout, or the form of a tooth. This supports the controversial idea of a relatively rapid “modular” form of evolution.”

Darren Naish fills in all the gory details at Tetrapod Zoology.