Imagine an animal that looks like a dinosaur, and you probably will not imagine a bat. But that may change. A team of paleontologists in China announced on Wednesday the discovery of a dinosaur that sported the same kinds of fleshy wings bats use to flit through the air.

The dinosaur, Ambopteryx longibrachium, lived about 163 million years ago. When Min Wang, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, first saw the fossil, which he and his team pulled out of Jurassic-age rocks in Liaoning Province in China, “I thought it was a bird,” he said.

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Birds evolved from dinosaurs, and so the two groups share many features. Dr. Wang assumed Ambopteryx was a bird because the animal sported relatively long forelimbs, just as modern birds do. But as his team carefully chipped away the rock surrounding the fossil over the course of about a year, distinctly dinosaurian features began to emerge. Ambopteryx, for one thing, had long fingers, a trait that birds lack.