AP, etc: A biplane dinosaur…again.
A few years ago a feathered, apparently flying dinosaur made news because both its front and rear legs included flight feathers. It was thought that its limbs held the sets of wings one in front of the other. More recently, a Texas Tech researcher thinks it more likely that the legs were tucked up under the body, placing their flight surface below and a bit behind the longer forelimb airfoils. And that would make the creature, called Microraptor, a biplane.
The AP’s Randolph E. Schmid writes that this means the Wright Bros were merely 125 million years behind nature’s design.
The wire moved what looks like an image of the earlier reconstruction of the creature’s planform. The one on the left above, from the paper, is the newer rendition. A higher-res of the imagined dino in flight is here.
The formal report is in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but it’s not the debut of the idea. This story has been around for awhile, it seems. The same lead author was in the news with this in 2005.
Other stories: Reuters Will Dunham; The Guardian (UK) Alok Jha; The Australian Lewis Smith;
Previous stories: National Geographic News Photos in the News, Oct. 2005. The pic is too big for this post, but it’s a good rendition.
Grist for the Mill: PNAS complete article (link goes to automatic pdf dowload site).
