Winged Robots Hint At the Origins of Flight

sciencehabit writes "Here's what we know about the evolution of flight: By about 150 million years ago, the forests were filled with flying — or perhaps just gliding — dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx, possibly similar to the ancestor of modern birds. What we don't know is what primitive wings were used for before bird ancestors could fly. A new study (abstract) provides some fresh data for this debate, not from fossils but from a winged robot (video included)."

Comments

This is a very interesting experiment

[Stirling Newberry]

Because it hints at being able to model biological systems with robots, and make comparative analysis of the different advantages that might be gained. Since many features evolve in parallel, it can also be used to judge the relative chance of rapid versus gradual evolution. Good catch sciencehabit.

Re:This is a very interesting experiment

[gnalle]

The wings only help because the robot was designed poorly. When the robot moves without wings the body of the robot jumps up and down and it rotates along a vertical axis, and that makes it hard for the robot to move. The wings stabilize the motion of the body and presses it towards the ground, and that allows the robot to move faster.

Real beetles don't have this problem because they move their legs in a more controlled fashion. I am sure that the sameis true for the dinasaurs that turned in to birds. Therefore this experiment does not prove a lot. The team is asking the right question, but they did not come up with a denifite answer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V1631-Vcm4

Re:And it happened several times

[BluBrick]

I hate stating something like this without any citation, but when I was reading some textbook for a class my girlfriend was taking back in college I was surprised that flight evolved separately multiple times according to the fossil record. Intermediate wings must provide a pretty statistically significant benefit.

This is why flight evolved independently multiple times.




Oh, come on! You just knew someone was going to do it.

Name one non-rapator that uses flapping for speed

[JumperCable]

Name one non-raptor based animal that uses flapping or wing like features to increase running or walking speed.

We have all sorts of mammals and snakes that use skin flaps for gliding. Unless we have examples of non-rapture creatures that use skin flaps of some sort to do increase walking/running speed, I would think the answer is obvious.

Re:Zergling Speed upgrade

[arpad1]

With all due respect to your smart-aleckiness, I don't think so.

At the very least the density of water, while resulting in a superficially similar motion to wing-flapping in air, is just such so much more dense a medium I'd guess the adaptations necessary for the penguin wouldn't easily translate to the adaptations necessary for flight. Then there's the problem of intermediate forms. What are the intermediate steps between a penguin adapted to "flying" in water and a penguin-descendent adapted to flying in air?

The "intermediate steps" problem is why I have doubts about birds evolving from purely gliding to powered flight.

Wings adapted to the production of thrust, to improve running performance, will also generate lift when held still in an air stream. The skeletal, musculature and nervous system adaptations can occur incrementally because incremental improvements result in incremental benefits. For a bird adapted to gliding the incremental benefit that accrues incremental, but immediate, benefits is a further perfection of gliding adaptations.