Re: Tail feathers

["James R. Cunningham" <jrccea@bellsouth.net>]

Chris Campbell wrote:
> 
snipped

> How likely is the possibility that they flew more or less like bats?  
There were only a few pterosaur similarities to bat flight. The big ones
flew a bit more like albatrosses, but had a completely different
mechanism for applying loads to the skeletal spar and for alleviation of
gust loading  

> I've
> always thought of pterodactyloids (and I guess our late Cretaceous biggies)
> as being hybrids of birds and bats, at least as far as flight mechanisms go.
> Is this reasonable?  Way off?  Kinda sorta but not really plausible?

You might with equal validity think of the lift and thrust producing
flight mechanisms of any one of the three as being something of a hybrid
of the other two. However, I don't recommend that sort of an analogy
because of the specific differences in flight control mechanisms between
the three and because of the gross differences in the way power was
applied to the wing during flapping flight.

                JimC