Re: Glider questions

[dbensen <dbensen@gotnet.net>]

>>Microscopic.  How much lift? Are we talking steady-state or unsteady lift
mechanisms?  What percentage of the body weight are you specifying that the
wings/tail feathers carry, and at what coefficient of lift?  As an aside,
when the tail is lifting, the drag goes up pretty rapidly.<<

Sigh, all right I be more specific.
How big can the airfoils (feathers) on the arms and tail of small archosaurs be
to alter lift and aerodynamics enough to be beneficial to the archosaur?

Remember the butterfly-wing experiments?  It was found that big wings are good
for lift and really big wings are better, but small wings, i.e. the
intermediate stage between having no wings at all and having fully developed
wings, have no beneficial effect on aerodynamics at all.  Also, it was found
that chitonous extensions of the exoskeleton of insects acted as radiators made
their heat-regualtion more efficient.  For this purpose, small extensions were
okay, and medium extensions were better, but past a certain size, larger and
larger extensions were no more efficient heat-regulators than were smaller
ones.  The cutoff point for the usefulness of different sizes of extensions for
different reasons were the SAME.  That is, the point at which the extensions
became no longer useful as heat regulators was the same as the point were they
started to become useful as wings.  Therefor, we can assume that primitive
insects evolved heat regulators that, through selection, became larger and
larger, and at a certain point, became useful as wings.


If we find out this sort of data for birds, perhaps a similar scenario can be
drawn up for them.

I'm sorry, but I don't remember the reference on that butterfly thing, although
I know I read it in a Gould article.

Dan