It was roughly the same size as a chicken, but the Yanornis could certainly out-fly your average hen. Unfortunately, even if we wanted to, we can’t put this to the test in a great race because the Yanornis stopped existing quite a while ago.

This fish-eating bird lived in the Liaoning province in China, during the early Cretacious period, when duck-billed dinosaurs roamed the earth. Critically, this animal was not a dinosaur, despite a famous hoax that combined the front end of a Yanornis fossil with the back end of a Dromaeosaurid Microraptor as a means of proving the existence of an “Archaeoraptor”.

Hoaxes aside, the Yanornis had a beak to catch fish and features allowing them to roam both sky and land.