March 18, 2013

Discovery News - Birds May Have Flown Like Four-Winged Kittyhawk

The world’s first birds all had four wings — not two — and flew with a similar construction to the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk plane, contends new research led by the renowned dinosaur and early avian hunter Xing Xu.

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Sankar Chatterjee, a paleontologist at Texas Tech University, told Michael Balter of Science that the new study makes it clear that “the four-wing form was exhibited not just by Microraptor, but also retained in successive lineages of early birds.”