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: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.