Dinosaur aerodynamis - dragonfly or airplane?

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Dinosaur aerodynamics touches off debate
Biplane or dragonfly? Wind tunnel tests may tell the tale
MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 5:50 p.m. MT Jan 22, 2007

Texas Tech / PNAS

This diagram of Microraptor gui shows the upper "arm" wings as well as the lower "leg" wings. Were they used in a biplane configuration (upper and lower) or a dragonfly configuration (front and back)?

WASHINGTON - Was it a bird? A biplane? Or a dragonfly? A newly published study opens a fresh chapter in the debate over how one of the earliest feathered dinosaurs used two sets of wings more than 125 million years ago.

The study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lays out a detailed argument for the biplane scenario. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and his Canadian collaborator, R. Jack Templin, suggest that Microraptor gui used two upper wings as well as two lower wings in an aerodynamic design much like that seen in the biplanes of early aviation.

Today, the biplane is widely considered an old-fashioned rarity. And the design is no longer seen in birds, though it’s not clear if it was a step on the way to modern birds or a dead end, tested by nature and discarded.

Microraptor, found in fossil form in China, was described by Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003 as having aerodynamic feathers on both its arms and legs. Xu suggested at the time that it glided, extending its legs backward so its wings were arranged one behind the other, like a dragonfly.

But Chatterjee noted that the feathers on the legs would not face forward, and argued that having one set of wings directly behind another would be aerodynamically inefficient.

Instead, Chatterjee suggested, the legs of the two-pound creature could have been held below the body in flight, creating two staggered wing sections, the upper one slightly ahead of the lower one.

One other flying dinosaur, Pedopenna, also had feathers on its legs, Chatterjee said, and modern raptors such as falcons have short feathers on their upper legs that reduce air resistance as they fly.

Chatterjee first advanced the dino-biplane theory in 2005 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America, and fleshed it out for the research paper published this week.



“Aircraft designers have mimicked many of nature’s flight ’inventions,’ usually inadvertently,” Chatterjee wrote. “Now, it seems likely that Microraptor invented the biplane 125 million years before the Wright 1903 Flyer.”

Xu, who said a variety of reconstructions have been suggested since the original one, called Chatterjee’s proposal “likely,” but added that “we really need to work painstakingly to check all details and have an accurate reconstruction, and then we can compare different models in computer or even in wind tunnel, which we are planning to do.”

“Microraptor is a critical species in understanding the origin of flight,” added Xu, who was not associated with Chatterjee’s research team.

Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said the question focuses on what the legs can do, and it’s a difficult problem because the fossils are flat and require interpretation as to what they would have looked like in three dimensions.

Evolutionary dead end?
Carrano, who also was not part of Chatterjee’s research team, said this creature was probably a side branch rather than a stage evolution had to pass through on the way to today’s birds.

“It’s difficult to see how this animal does anything well, it seems so ungainly,” Carrano said. “It forces us to think creatively because it’s so far off the beaten path.”

There are often such experiments that fall by the wayside, he said.

“The important thing is, because we’ve now got all these feathered dinosaurs to look at, it has kind of opened the gates a bit to speculating about how flight evolved,” Carrano said.

Chatterjee’s research was funded by Texas Tech University.

This report includes information from The Associated Press and MSNBC.com.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive