Missing the Flight   Emily Willoughby  The plot continues to
thicken when it comes to bird evolution and the origin of
flight. Eosinopteryx brevipenna is the latest feathered,
birdlike theropod dinosaur to emerge from rich sites in Liaoning
Province in northeastern China. While a diverse group of such
creatures have been found in Early Cretaceous deposits,
Eosinopteryx is older, dating from the mid- to late Jurassic
period, roughly 155 million to 150 million years ago. Along with
Anchiornis, another recently described Jurassic specimen of
similar body plan, Eosinopteryx shows that, even at an early
evolutionary stage, bird-like dinosaurs occupied different
niches in the same ecosystem.  Pascal Godefroit of the Royal
Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and Gareth
Dyke, of the University of Southampton, England, along with four
colleagues, described the attributes of the adult—or nearly
adult—Eosinopteryx fossil from a complete skeleton finely
preserved in slate. The pigeonsize animal is remarkabl