If wings came before flight, what were they for? (Lily Burton, 5/08/26, Science News)
In the experiments, Jablonski, now at the Museum and Institute of Zoology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, and his colleagues focused on small, feathered dinosaurs called pennaraptorans. The animals’ “protowings” were unlikely to have supported flight, says Minyoung Son, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
The surface area of the wings, he says, would have been too small to create the aerodynamic force needed to lift pennaraptorans off the ground, and the ranges of their wing joints would also have limited their movements. Plus, Son says, feathers need to have an asymmetrical shape to be aerodynamic, and based on the fossil record, these dinosaurs “don’t have the aerodynamic feathers yet.”