Professor Ronald Fearing and his research team at the University of California, Berkeley, originally intended to create a robot that could navigate all types of terrain. When their first robot DASH, short for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, fell slightly short of their objective, they decided to attach wings to the robotic cockroach. Only later did […]
While many animals are able to fly, birds are the creatures that have mastered flight. They evolved feathers and an aerodynamic body shape. But how exactly did they evolve the ability for complex flight? Were birds first capable of gliding then modified this advantage into powered flight? Or did they begin flapping their wings […]
How is a half wing useful? This problem has divided the scientific community on the evolution of flight since the time of Darwin because it questions the evolutionary benefit of limbs that are incapable of flight. Bird ancestors clearly did not grow fully functional wings overnight and it is still unclear exactly how wings […]
Ten years ago a pair of archaeologists dug up a remarkable dinosaur fossil in the Liaoning Province of northeastern China. It appeared to be very similar to other small raptors that had been found around the world. It had a feathered body, adding to the prominent theory that many raptors had feathers. The remarkable aspect of this dinosaur […]
As children, we all visited history museums and gazed up at the ancient bones of a dinosaur rearing towards the sky, fighting off some other ferocious winged being. But was that ferocious winged being, when it was alive, just a bunch of bones too? According to new findings, the pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus, might not have been able […]
Humans have always looked at birds awed at the grace and ease with which the soar through the air. We strived to achieve the power of flight for thousands of years and only mastered the ability in the last century with the help of propellor and jet turbine powered flight. But what has puzzled scientists […]
The archaeopteryx was long considered to be the transitional form the between reptiles and birds—the evolutionary link between non-avian dinosaurs and birds. First discovered in 1861 immediately after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, this ancient species—about 150 million years old—had teeth, a flat sternum, a long, bony tail, gastralia, and three […]