Microraptor
Name means “Small thief”
Microraptor was a crow-sized dinosaur with feathered wings on its arms AND its legs. Its feathers were shiny black, like a crow's.
Microraptor was a small dromaeosaurid from the Early Cretaceous forests of northeastern China, preserved with long flight feathers on both its arms and legs. Fossil melanosomes show its plumage was glossy and iridescent black, and it is a key animal in debates about how flight evolved in dinosaurs.
Microraptor mmartyniuk.png — Matt Martyniuk · CC BY 3.0
Pictures
Spin it in 3D
3D model description: a 3D model of Microraptor shaped from a scientific life reconstruction painting, with the painting's colours and skin texture wrapped around it. It is not a scan of a real fossil.
About this model
This model is shaped from a scientific life reconstruction by Matt Martyniuk: the painting's outline gives the 3D body and the painting itself is its skin. It is sized to the real animal's length (about 0.8 m), so in AR it appears life-size!
It looks best from the side, like the painting it comes from. It is not a fossil scan — museums such as the Smithsonian 3D collection share real fossil scans you can explore.
What might it sound like?
Transcript: Bright, rapid chirps with a soft hiss at the end, about 1.5 seconds
🤔 Nobody knows exactly how dinosaurs sounded
This is a scientific guess. Microraptor was a small, bird-like dinosaur, and small birds make high-pitched calls. Early dinosaurs probably lacked the songbird voice box, so it may have chirped or hissed rather than sung.
Voice boxes and soft tissue almost never fossilise, so sound reconstructions use clues: body size (bigger animals make lower sounds), the calls of living relatives (crocodiles boom with closed mouths; birds coo and hiss), and hollow structures such as hadrosaur crests that could have worked like a trumpet.
Sound: synthesised by DinoVerse from these scientific ideas (CC0). It is a creative guess, not a recording.
Food and habits
Carnivore
Meat-eater
How it ate
Caught small animals in trees, on the ground and at the water's edge, gulping them down head-first with its small, sharp teeth.
It ate…
- small birds
- fish
- small mammals
- lizards such as Indrasaurus
Microraptor
…and was eaten by
👑 Probably nothing, once fully grown — a top predator or too big to tackle!
Arrows show energy moving up the food chain: from food to eater.
Watch it walk
Quick facts
| 📏 Length | 0.7–1 m (2–3 ft) |
|---|---|
| ↕️ Height | 0.2–0.3 m (0–1 ft) |
| ⚖️ Weight | 0.5–1.4 kg (1.1–3.1 lb) |
| ⏳ When it lived | 125–120 million years ago (Early Cretaceous) |
| 📍 Fossils found | Jiufotang Formation, Liaoning Province, China |
| 🔎 Discovered | 2000 by Xu Xing, Zhou Zhonghe and Wang Xiaolin |
| 🧬 Group | Theropods — Saurischia › Theropoda |
Where scientists disagree, we show a range. Sizes are for adults.
How big was it?
Where and when
- 📍 Jiufotang Formation, Liaoning Province, China (Asia)
Lived 125–120 million years ago
That's about 123 million years before you were born! Humans have only existed for about 0.3 million years.
See it on the big timeline →Did you know?
- 1Microraptor had four wings, two on its arms and two on its legs!
- 2It was about the size of a crow.
- 3Its feathers were black and shiny, with a rainbow shimmer like a crow's or starling's.
- 4One Microraptor fossil still had a whole lizard in its tummy.
- In 2012 scientists studied melanosomes, tiny colour-producing structures preserved in its feathers, and found they matched the glossy, iridescent black plumage of modern crows and starlings.
- Stomach contents from different specimens include an enantiornithine bird, fish, a small mammal and the lizard Indrasaurus, showing it was a flexible generalist hunter.
- Whether it could truly flap-fly or only glide is debated; some studies suggest that large, bird-like feathers and shoulder anatomy would have allowed at least limited powered flight.
- Its leg feathers have no direct match among living birds, and researchers still argue about how the hind wings were held during flight.
Myth vs fact
❌ MythMicroraptor was a bird.
✅ FactIt was a dromaeosaurid, a close cousin of Velociraptor, not a bird. Feathers and wings evolved in dinosaurs before true birds appeared.
Mini quiz
1. How many wings did Microraptor have?
2. What colour were Microraptor's feathers?
3. Which famous dinosaur was a close cousin of Microraptor?
Related animals
Velociraptor
TheropodLate CretaceousCarnivore
Archaeopteryx
TheropodLate JurassicCarnivore
Deinonychus
TheropodEarly CretaceousCarnivore
Yutyrannus
TheropodEarly CretaceousCarnivore
Sources
Media on this page
- Microraptor mmartyniuk.png — Matt Martyniuk · CC BY 3.0
- Fern in forest by I. Levitan (1895, N. Novgorod).jpg — Isaac Levitan · Public domain
- Microraptor 3D model, shaped from the life reconstruction "Microraptor mmartyniuk.png" — Matt Martyniuk (artwork); 3D shaping by DinoVerse · CC BY 3.0
- Microraptor reconstructed call (synthesised) — DinoVerse (synthesised) · CC0 1.0
- Microraptor gui holotype.png — David W. E. Hone, Helmut Tischlinger, Xing Xu, Fucheng Zhang · CC BY 2.5
- Fred Wierum Microraptor.png — Fred Wierum · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Microraptor-Beijing Museum of Natural History.jpg — Jonathan Chen · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Microraptor Restoration.png — Fred Wierum · CC BY-SA 4.0