Origin of flight: Could 'four-winged' dinosaurs fly?
Our understanding of the origin of birds, feathers and flight has been greatly advanced by new discoveries of feathered non-avian dinosaurs, but functional analyses have not kept pace with taxonomic descriptions. Zhang and Zhou describe feathers on the tibiotarsus of a new basal enantiornithine bird from the Early Cretaceous of China. They infer, as did Xu and colleagues from similar feathers on the small non-avian theropod Microraptor found in similar deposits, that these leg feathers had aerodynamic properties and so might have been used in some kind of flight.
Padian
Kevin
K
Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. kpadian@.berkeley.edu
Dial
Kenneth P
KP
D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D001717:Birds / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D002681:China; D025061:Dinosaurs / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*; D005241:Feathers / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D005426:Flight, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D005580:Fossils; D006614:Hindlimb / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D049690:History, Ancient; D008954:Models, Biological; D010802:Phylogeny; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014921:Wings, Animal / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*