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Jing-Shan Zhao of Tsinghua University, Beijing, and his colleagues, Jing-Shan Zhao of Tsinghua University, Beijing, and his colleagues.
The findings, published in PLOS Computational Biology, providing new insights into the origin of flight, which has been a point of debate since the 1861 discovery of Archeopteryx. Whereas a gliding type of flight has been found to increase in the evolutionary history.
To examine this key point in evolutionary history, Zhao and his study Caudipteryx, the most primitive, non-flying dinosaur known to have had "proto-wings." This bipedal animal would have weighed around 5 kilograms and ran up to 8 meters per second.
First, the researchers used a mathematical approach called modal effective mass theory to analyze the mechanical effects of running on various parts of Caudipteryx's body. These calculations revealed that running between 2.5 to 5.8 meters per second caused vibrations that caused the dinosaur's wings to flap.
Real-world experiments provided additional support for these calculations. The scientists built a life-size robot of Caudipteryx that was running at different speeds, and confirmed that running caused a flapping motion of the wings. They also fitted with wings and flanges, with longer wings and longer wings.
"Our work shows that the motion of flapping feathered wings was developed passively and naturally on the dinosaur ran on the ground," Zhao says. "Although this flapping motion could not be made faster than the time, the motion of flapping wings may be more than gliding."
Zhao says that the next step for this research is to analyze the lift and thrust of Caudipteryx's feathered wings during the passive flapping process.
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