Earliest Birds May Have Run and Flapped Wings to Learn How to Fly

The earliest known birds learned to fly by running quickly and flapping their wings, not leaping from tall trees, according to California researchers. Exactly how birds began to fly has been hotly debated since the 1800s. Most agree that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but how they took to the skies has been a mystery. Critics of the running theory argued that early birds could run fast enough to launch themselves.

But paleontologist Luis Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Phillip Burgers of the San Diego Natural History Museum used aerodynamic calculations and fossil records to show that the oldest known bird, the 150-million-year-old archaeopteryx, could triple its running speed by flapping its wings, they report in today’s Nature.

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Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II