Dr Robert Nudds and Dr Gareth Dyke point to the obvious but hitherto overlooked fact that modern birds don't offer many clues about how they arrived at their current state of aerial prowess. The key to understanding how flapping flight arose, they claim, is not how proto-birds moved their limbs in a bird-like way, but rather how they came to move both forelimbs together in the first place. "Birds are poor models of their flightless ancestors, the theropod dinosaurs," said Dr Nudds. (source: manchester.ac.uk)
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