Winged dinosaurs can't fly

In movies, they flutter in the air with tremendous speed. But in fact, flying dinosaurs can hardly escape the ground because it is too heavy.

After analyzing the flight patterns of 28 birds, scientists from Tokyo University (Japan) confirmed that the lizard fingerlings, weighing up to 250 kg and are considered the largest flying animals ever appeared. Earth, can't beat the wings fast enough to fly up into the air. They only had enough power to glide a short distance from the cliffs to the ground.

But fossil experts say the lizard-like bones evolved in a way that allowed them to fly.

Lizard fingerlings appeared on the planet about 251 million years ago and continue to survive after the dinosaurs became extinct by a disaster 65 million years ago.

Biologically, they are not dinosaurs, but prehistoric winged reptiles.

Lizard fingerling in a movie.Photo: makingmovies.tv.

Professor Katsufumi Sato of the University of Tokyo and colleagues studying many birds in the Crozet Islands (between Madagascar and Antarctica). By attaching wing accelerometers to 28 species and monitoring their flight activity, he concluded that animals weighing more than 40 kg cannot afford to beat their wings quickly to maintain a state of neglect. aerial badger. That explains why large seagulls, one of the largest birds in the world, only weigh up to 22 kg.

"The maximum flapping speed of a bird is limited by muscle strength. The wingspan of large birds is usually long. But the longer the wingspan, the slower the flapping speed. Therefore, a bird has weighing 40 kg or more cannot fly safely in bad weather conditions, " Sato said.

But some experts disagree with Sato's conclusion. Dr. Mike Habib of John Hopkins Medical School, Maryland, said: "Sato's 40 kg threshold has a problem. He has not taken into account the anatomical, physiological and environmental differences between flying lizards and birds ".