Re: Archaeopteryx not the first bird, is the earliest known (powered) flying dinosaur

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

Jim Cunningham (jrccea@bellsouth.net) wrote:

<Albatrosses and vultures developed two different types of soaring as
specializations arising from powered flapping.  It's not a bad way to get
there.....>

  Correct, but when I asked about soaring from powered flight, I was using that
scenario to argue where the powered flappers were preceding *Microraptor* in
GSP's argument, if *Microraptopr* could be a soaring animal. As I see it,
animals today that use various gliding mechanisms and even controlled gliding,
using their arms, tend to have many of the features GSP argues are innate for
fliers, such as sifakas, arguing that such features would be present before
flight, and could be exapted towards that locomotory system. As it is, the
exaptation explanation of Ostrom and others has NOT been argued either for or
against by GSP in DotA in much detail at all, favoring rather a simple
explanatory model of his own and arguing that other models are worse for not
being supported as flight-related evolution in birds. Yet, no one has argued
that flight did not evolve in birds, nor in fact has anyone argued that flight
did not evolve BEFORE birds, but so far the fossils do not strongly indicate
that flight had a single origin, either, which GSP has argued it does. This
conflict is at the heart of the debate, and adapatations stemming from
flight-based systems are largely irrelevant to it, except when, as GSP stated,
soaring in *Microraptor* when he has impugned *Archaeopteryx*' flight ability
shows that poor-flapping followed by soaring is missing some neccessary
mechanical steps.

  Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


                
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