Re: FYI -- Microraptor gui, Burnham and Alexander, PNAS...

[Mike Habib <habib@jhmi.edu>]

Excellent point regarding the myology - articulation fidelity is often  
analyzed without incorporating constraints of muscular anatomy,  
including moment arm changes that may preclude the proposed motion.   
And, as I suggested in my earlier post, I see no reason at all to make  
the poor thing sprawl to begin with.

Cheers,

--Mike H.


Michael Habib
Assistant Professor of Biology
Chatham University
Woodland Road, Pittsburgh PA  15232
Buhl Hall, Room 226A
mhabib@chatham.edu
(443) 280-0181



On Jan 26, 2010, at 2:58 PM, David Marjanovic wrote:

> > http://dinobase.gly.bris.ac.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?id=298
> >
> > Twelfth post and beyond, required reading for any one going to
> > comment on the "impossible" leg-sprawling flight posture of the
> > _Microraptor_ model.
>
> That's a case of "wait for the paper that won't even be begun  
> anytime soon".
>
> Importantly, however, those posts explicitly don't argue for the  
> 180°-sprawled pose that Burnham et al. wanted to squeeze *M.* into.  
> I was there at their talk at the SVP meeting of 2008, and they had a  
> reconstruction where the femoral head pointed not into the  
> acetabulum but ventrally (vertically downwards), and the  
> trochanteric crest touched the ilium, leaving _no_ space for the  
> very muscles that would have pulled the legs up into this pose! That  
> was cringeworthy.