That's all fine and dandy, but all it does is open new problems. For example, what good is a quarter of a wing?
I'm gonna go out on a limb (pun, hehe) and assume you didn't read the article.
Or, maybe you did.
Either way.
Generally speaking natural selection doesn't operate in leaps and bounds, and even the "really fast" evolution that you hear about sometimes occurs over a period of several hundred thousand years. Since geological phenomenon take a very long time to occur, so one can safely assume that the need to adapt to a changing environment is also rather gradual.
The other mistake you're making is thinking of the wing, only, and in chunks, rather than a series of incremental changes happening holistically across the population of organisms.
I assume when you're imagining the "quarter-wing" you're thinking of a stub of a wing 1/4 the wing span of whatever you picture a normal wing to be. That would be very inaccurate.
Remember, that wings share much of the same structures as our arms and forelimbs. The skeleton of a bird's wing looks much like the arms of a human, with shoulder, elbow and wrist joints obviously correspondent to anatomies of other closely related species.
A more appropriate mental picture would be an animal that walked on its hind limbs. Its fore limbs are quite useful for manipulating its environment, and have a secondary feature of some loose skin, or perhaps some early feathers, that when outstretched allow the organism to have a spoiler like effect (similar to that used by F1 cars).
That's what a "quarter wing" would be, not 1/4 of a modern wing stuck on the outside of some poor, unfortunate animal. Rather, what more or less looks like a reptillian arm with some extra stuff on it that allows the organism to use its arms for more than one purpose.
