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Re: flying Archie



James R. Cunningham wrote:

It's not energetically 'cheaper',

I meant metabolically cheaper, with a lower respiration rate and calorific demand (for example).


but it ain't bad either.

Yes, the _Archaeopteryx_-style flight mode must have been adaptively advantageous in order for it to get off the ground (so to speak). I'm sure you'd agree, but I don't like thinking of _Archaeopteryx_ flight as 'inferior' to modern avian flight - just different in certain important ways, and possibly ancestral to the way our modern feathered friends do things.


Cheers

Tim