On 11/6/2010 7:56 AM, David Marjanovic wrote:
The wings of *Microraptor* are remarkably narrow, much more so than Archie's. Probably the foot feathers took over some of that function, though. *Confuciusornis*, however, has long, narrow wings and no foot feathers. The phalangeal proportions of both (and Archie) indicate that these animals weren't cursorial, but hardly scansorial either; Archie and *C.* are right at the boundary between terrestrial and scansorial birds, *M.* is not above it either.
This is largely intuition, so I will place it as a question -- wouldn't long narrow wings be exactly what you want, should you be forced to flapfly w/ a limited upstroke?