Looks like chicken? New feathered dinosaur discovered in China

Doyle Rice | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Newly discovered dinosaur looks like a chicken This is earliest known ancestor of birds.

We may not know how it tasted, but it certainly looked like a chicken.

A new species of feathered dinosaur — the earliest known bird ancestor — was recently discovered by a team of paleontologists in Liaoning, China.

What they found there was a remarkably well-preserved, 125-million-year-old fossilized skeleton of the three-foot long animal, which has been named Jianianhualong tengi.

Jianianhualong tengi is a troodontid dinosaur — one of the bird-like dinosaurs that are the closest relatives to modern-day birds.

One of the key features of the newly discovered dinosaur was its asymmetrical feathers, which are wider on one side than the other. This is a prime factor in the history of animal flight.

"Asymmetrical feathers have been associated with flight capability, but are also found in species that do not fly, and their appearance was a major event in feather evolution," the authors write in the study.

It is not clear whether Jianianhualong tengi was capable of flight.

“It is extremely challenging to accurately reconstruct aerodynamic capabilities in early fossil birds and bird-like dinosaurs because there is a lot of missing data to deal with,” Michael Pittman, a paleontologist at the University of Hong Kong and an author of the study, told National Geographic.

The discovery was published Tuesday in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed British journal.