http://dinobase.gly.bris.ac.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?id=298 Twelfth post and beyond, required reading for any one going to comment on the "impossible" leg-sprawling flight posture of the _Microraptor_ model.
That's a case of "wait for the paper that won't even be begun anytime soon".Importantly, however, those posts explicitly don't argue for the 180°-sprawled pose that Burnham et al. wanted to squeeze *M.* into. I was there at their talk at the SVP meeting of 2008, and they had a reconstruction where the femoral head pointed not into the acetabulum but ventrally (vertically downwards), and the trochanteric crest touched the ilium, leaving _no_ space for the very muscles that would have pulled the legs up into this pose! That was cringeworthy.