Microraptor
Choose Microraptor and you get four wings instead of two, glossy black feathers that shimmered in the light, and a home in the forests of Early Cretaceous China.
Liaoning’s lakeside forests
You live about 120 million years ago in what is now Liaoning Province, north-eastern China. The Jiufotang Formation records forests around lakes, with conifers and ginkgos, and periodic volcanic eruptions whose ash buried animals so gently that their feathers survived. Around you live early birds, pterosaurs, small mammals and other feathered dinosaurs.
You are under a metre long, much of it tail, and weigh around 1 kilogram. Long flight feathers grow from your arms and also from your legs, giving you four wings, plus a fan of feathers at the tip of your tail.
Glider or flapper?
How you used four wings is debated. Some researchers see you mainly as a glider launching from trees; others argue you could also flap and take off from the ground. Your hind-leg feathers would have made running awkward, so you probably spent much time in trees, though not necessarily all of it.
A 2012 study of pigment-bearing structures found that your plumage was black with an iridescent sheen, much like a modern crow or starling.
An unfussy eater
Microraptor fossils have been found with a remarkable range of last meals: a small bird, a fish, a lizard swallowed head-first and, in a specimen described in 2022, the foot of a small mammal. You were clearly an opportunistic hunter in trees, on the ground and at the water’s edge.
That varied diet made you a generalist in a crowded forest, competing with early birds and other small predators. Your teeth were small and serrated, and your sharp claws on hands and feet would have helped you climb trunks as well as grab prey.
