Re: dinos and birds

[Christopher Taylor <ck.taylor@auckland.ac.nz>]

One bat, the New Zealand short-tailed (_Mystacina tuberculata_) is a quite
adept mover terrestrially - the wings can get folded very close to the arms
and tucked into special pockets, and there is no  membrane between the legs,
so on the ground it's effectively normally four-legged, and scrambles fairly
successfully. As to what it says about the possibility of a flightless bat,
I'm not sure - it's often mentioned in such discussions, but it's still a
quite able flier, and flying seems to still be a pretty vital part of its
lifestyle.

    Cheers,

        Christopher Taylor

On 5/7/04 7:11 am, "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Stephen Moore (smooreph@yahoo.com) wrote:
> 
> <Evolution has developed bats and pterosaurs into excellent flyer's but
> they would be hard pressed to evolve further into terrestrial bipeds or
> quadrupeds. Birds could theoretically fly to an island, colonize, fill
> niches, grow gigantic and flightless and prosper for a few million but
> when the water levels begin to rise, for whatever geological reason, the
> bird cannot return to the air and perishes.>
> 
> While the use of inferring the small bats to the fantastically huge
> pterosaurs with coupled limbs would seem to be intuitively linked, the
> actual connection would seem to have so-far escaped those who have looked
> at this problem, as to my knowledge, no one has yet to "determine" for the
> satisfaction of scientific interest, why pterosaurs should NOT have become
> flightless, whereas birds were able to do so in the Late Cretaceous
> (hesperornithids/baptornithids) -- there are no flightless bats. Part of
> the problem seems to be stuck in equating bats and pterosaurs as
> essentially the same thing, but no one has yet to determine why a membrane
> that extends between fore- and hindlimbs would prevent loss of flight,
> when pterosaurs seem perfectly capable -- moreso in fact than bats -- to
> walk around as fly.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> =====
> Jaime A. Headden
> 
> Little steps are often the hardest to take.  We are too used to making leaps
> in the face of adversity, that a simple skip is so hard to do.  We should all
> learn to walk soft, walk small, see the world around us rather than zoom by
> it.
> 
> "Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
> 
> 
> 
> 
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