Re: vaulting pterosaur launch, questions

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jrc" <jrccea@bellsouth.net>
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 9:55 PM

> > However, as with the Wright brothers, you can't very well have powered 
> > flight until you can have controlled flight.
>
> Actually, you can, but it leads to a lot of kersplats.  What it would more 
> likely lead to, is very stable flight modes in the earlier forms of flying 
> vertebrates.  Long tails, etc.

And that's exactly what we see in pterosaurs and in birds. Not in bats so 
far, though. Should I take this as evidence that flight started ground-up in 
pterosaurs and birds but trees-down in bats, so that the bats evolved 
control during their hypothetical gliding phase before they started 
flapping? :-)

> Personally, I think flight origins were probably neither trees down
> nor ground up, but rather a mixture of making
> use of all energy sources available.

This requires, of course, that the animals in question were fairly good at 
climbing. For theropods that's not so clear. *Archaeopteryx* in particular 
has very terrestrial feet.