Flapping while running up a ramp takes far
less energy than flight at the same angle.

What’s the News: How did birds get their wings? And how did they start using them to fly? These questions have bedeviled evolutionary biologists for more than a century, and with flight’s origins long buried, a lot of careful measurements of how modern birds work combined with clever guesswork has resulted in several fiercely differing theories. The two major camps have proto-birds either dropping from trees or running along the ground before finally taking to the air.

A new study lends credence to the idea that flapping wings while running could have been involved by showing that it requires much less energy than flying while still helping birds get over obstacles. This suggests that it could have been an easy way for proto-birds to start going through the motions.

How the Heck:

The researchers had noticed that young birds running up ramps and other obstacles flap their wings strongly, gaining speed and balance. The team wondered how much energy the process took: as the behavior gets birds over obstacles as effectively as actual flight, if it took less investment of energy, ...