When a simple torsion fracture turned an Early Cretaceous bird into bizarre bat-wing dinosaur

Today, another graphic of Yi qi
(this time with animation, Figs. 1, 2) of an earlier (2015) hypothesis that showed no styliform element in Yi qi (and Ambopteryx), only a broken ulna (Fig. 3).

The bat-wing bird hypothesis
promoted by Dececchi et al. 2020 and prior authors since 2015 (see below) is a myth. A misinterpretation. A false tradition that will not die. Here I am trying to put yet another nail in a coffin that will not close six years after the first nail.

Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of this scandal
is the large number of professors, grad students, assorted paleontologists (see below) and paleoartists (see below) who gladly accepted a 2015 reconstruction of Yi qi that not only added a completely new long bone to the arm (the so-called ‘styliform’), but turned a perfectly good Early Cretaceous bird into a bat-wing dinosaur with flight membranes instead of feathers.

Completely forgotten
was the traditional dictum, “exceptional claims require exceptions evidence”... or in this case, just any meager evidence at all. No one else, using the most advanced imaging techniques (Fig. 1, Dececchi et al. 2020) and first-hand observation, were able to see that poor Yi qi simply suffered from a broken arm.

As an example,
five years after the broken arm had been noted online, Dececchi et al. 2020 were still trying to figure out how Yi qi would have flown with bat-wings and a fourth long arm bone. Highly regarded referees and editors, the traditional gate keepers of good data and good science, kept approving this nonsense in published works (see below).

Question for you, dear reader:
Should Xu et al. 2015 and Deceechi et al. 2020 retract their papers? Like the Oculudentavis scandal, their claims are demonstrably false. Were these examples of headline grabbing by paleontologists who should have know better? Or just a lot of scientists making an honest mistake? As always, decisions like this are up to you, whose opinions ultimately create the consensus.

In theory, facts should override opinions.
However in practice, sometimes (in this case, since 2015) sensational opinions override facts.

References
Dececchi TA, et al. (8 co-authors) 2020. Aerodynamics show membrane-winged theropods were a poor glidiing dead-end. iScience 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101574
Wang M, O’Connor JK.; Xu X and Zhou Z 2019. A new Jurassic scansoriopterygid and the loss of membranous wings in theropod dinosaurs. Nature 569: 256–259. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1137-z
Xu X, Zheng X-T, Sullivan C, Wang X-L, Xing l, Wang Y, Zhang X-M, O’Connor JK, Zhang F-C and Pan Y-H 2015. A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran theropod with preserved evidence of membranous wings. Nature (advance online publication)
doi:10.1038/nature14423

reptileevolution.com/scansoriopterygidae2.htm
wiki/Yi_(dinosaur)
wiki/Ambopteryx

Paleoartist John Conway made an illustration of Yi qi with bat wings you can see here.

Paeloartist Emily Willoughby made an illustration of Yi qi with bat wings you can see here.

Darren Naish blogging for Scientific Americanin 2015 wrote,
“It probably looked more like a bat-winged parrot.”

Darren Naish also reported, “Exactly such a creature was predicted by my colleague Andrea Cau (and illustrated by excellent palaeoartist Lukas Pankarin) way back in October 2008 after the publication of Epidexipteryx* (Zhang et al. 2008).”

Naish continues, “Could Yi qi‘s styliform elements actually be battle spines or something? Xu et al. (2015, supplementary information) state that “we are aware of no case in which a long, unjointed bony or cartilaginous rod extending from a limb joint has evolved in any vertebrate without being associated with an aerodynamic membrane, and plausible alternative functions for such a structure are difficult to conceive”.

“It’s difficult to pinpoint where the mistakes have been made, but my suspicion is that Yi qi would have looked more like other maniraptorans, and less dragony overall.

Seemingly every explanation was offered, but the simplest explanation, the one you can see: a broken ulna.

Naish 2015 continues,
“It shouldn’t be lost on you that Yi qi and other scansoriopterygids look to have been experimenting with flight and climbing, despite being well outside the bird clade itself.”

In the LRT, Yi qi and other scansoriopterygids are birds derived from Solnhhofen birds, members of the bird clade itself.

Yi qi was made a plastic toy featured online here.
Googling “Yi qi – images” will bring you here to a panoply of images.

Some publicity at the time: