The Origin of Flight: What Use is Half a Wing?

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At the University of Montana’s Flight Lab, Ken Dial has been researching the mechanics of bird flight. His experiments with young birds that are learning to fly provide new evidence for how flight might have evolved in a group of feathered theropod dinosaurs. Critics of evolutionary theory had asked Charles Darwin the question “what use is half a wing?” – in other words, what evolutionary advantage would a feathered limb, the precursor to a wing, provide? Dial’s research suggests an answer.