When I read "powered flight" I imagine them with little outboard motors and propellers
Sometimes it's easy to forget just how rare fossilization is.
It requires that the species live in a climate with pretty specific conditions, to die under a few very specific circumstances, at a particular convergence of atypical events. The dino bones we have represent a tiny little fraction of the species that lived.
Plus fossils can form, emerge, and erode away before humans even evolved, thus removing our chances of knowing about species that DID have a chance to fossilize, all because bad luck said the geology between now and then would fuck our knowledge over.
I have a couple of fossils round the house and it's so incredible to behold a creature that lived millions of years ago.
Aliens, obviously
Pfft - they’re all over the place!
Why wouldn't it be gliding -> flapping -> liftoff?
No reason it wouldn't be. Ground up vs tree down is more about if controlling a jump or a fall comes before the gliding.
Personally I see the researchers who place bat locomotion as most analogous to how pterosaurs would've moved, and then further reason that our evidence points more towards bats being tree down (but we're STILL not sure on that one because everything that flys evolves too fuckin fast) and that would also mean pterosaurs are PROBABLY also a tree down evolutionary path.
Of course, I'm not a scientist with any sort of official opinions, but I also feel like your babies surviving a fall from a canopy by gliding would have more evolutionary weight and result in the super fast adaptation towards flight than controlling jumps.
No evidence if the intermediate species. It makes sense, but without evidence, it's just conjecture.
And with gaps in fossil record that last for millions of years, who knows whether we will ever figure out the pathway to flight.
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
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