article_snippet.sent: The discovery has provided new insight into how vertebrates first began to take to the air.
article_snippet.sent: Close to the origin of birds there are many lineages trying to get into the air but there was only one group that succeeded. '
article_snippet.sent: it reminds us that the early history of flight was full of innovations, not all of which survived.'
article_snippet.sent: Dr Kevin Padian, a palaeontologist at the University of California Berkeley, warned that the animal may not have been able to fly at all.
article_snippet.sent: As for gliding, if Yi qi’s styliform element helped to support a membranous aerofoil, Yi qi’s styliform element can be used to reconstruct the planform of the wing, as Xu and colleagues have done.
article_snippet.sent: But in a gliding animal, the centre of lift of a membranous aerofoil should be fairly congruent with the centre of gravity of the body — if the bulk of a gliding animal’s weight falls too far behind the centre of lift, the back end will sag and a gliding animal will stall.
article_snippet.sent: That is clearly the case in the authors’ reconstruction of Yi qi, but an aerofoil that was swept back more, if anatomically possible, might have mitigated this problem.
article_snippet.sent: Still, we are left in a quandary: an animal with a strange structure that looks as if it could have been used in flight, borne by an animal that otherwise shows no such tendencies.
article_snippet.sent: And so far, there is no other plausible explanation for the function of this structure.