Trivia Junction

A Compendium of trivia I find interesting
...for the curious

2 + 2 = flying dinosaur?

Biplanes helped mark the beginning of manned flight. Pairs of wings might also have helped an early feathered dinosaur to fly.

It's a controversial notion, but Canadian and American scientists say that, based on recovered fossils, Microraptor gui glided between treetops on stacked wings.

The small feathered dinosaur, whose remains were first discovered four years ago in China, was probably a dead-end experiment in flight. But if paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and R. Jack Templin of Ottawa, Ontario, are correct, M. gui was nonetheless a sight to behold in its time.

Chatterjee and Templin contend that M. gui possessed a rear set of long feathers that extended parallel to and beneath its outstretched arms.

Others, however, are dubious. Evolutionary biologist Kenneth Dial of the University of Montana told Scientific American that the idea was “pure conjecture and absolutely not science ... an arm-waving evolutionary interpretation.”

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