Microraptor gui. Photo Credit: American Museum of Natural History in New York Washington, Jan 22: Re-evaluation of fossil remains of the earliest flying dinosaurs suggest that the creatures used two sets of wings as in a biplane for flying.
Sankar Chatterjee, Ph.D., Horn professor of museum sciences at Texas Tech University, and R. Jack Templin, a retired aeronautical engineer, studied the fossils and found that Microraptor gui, one of the earliest gliders, utilized four wings to glide between treetops.
The dinosaur had long and asymmetric flight feathers on both its hands and feet, and such a dragonfly like tandem wing design would not have made it possible for the creature to either achieve a suitable lift or a normal gait on the ground.
The researchers said the hindlegs were positioned below the body, adopting a biplane-like design.
A computer flight simulation using this design showed that Microraptor would undulate up and down, an ideal approach for gliding among trees, they wrote in their study “Biplane wing planform and flight performance of the feathered dinosaur Microraptor gui”.
”Whether a biplane-like phase represented a precursor to all bird flight or was just a failed offshoot is uncertain, although the researchers suggest most fossil evidence points to the former scenario,” the researchers said.
The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (ANI)