Reptiles Needed More Than Feathers to Fly
12th July 2009
Claessens’ team couldn’t look at fossilization-unfriendly soft tissue, but instead compared the skeletons of large modern birds and pterosaurs. Using x-ray movies and CT scans, they charted the skeletal mechanics of wing flapping in birds, then found similar bone structures in the dinosaurs. They also observed nearly identical relationships between body size and bone density.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
July 13th, 2009 at 06:27
That’s nice, but birds are not descended from pterosaurs, which are an evolutionary dead-end. Hollow bones are not known to have been present in any flying therapods until after the end of the Cretaceous, after the extinction of the rest of the dinosaurs, by which time they are usually just considered birds.