Okay, birds.
Rather than two wings, like pterosaurs, bats, and just about every other flying vertebrate ever, consider a possible ancestor species which, like flying squirrels, uses all four of its limbs equally in flight and on the ground.
Advantages of such a scheme: primarily, that the amount of wing surface proportional to the 'infrastructure organ' (digestion, brain, etc.) is higher - power-to-weight is better, which has obvious applications for just about any flying critter.
Also, each pair of wings can, when needful, be specialized for different purposes, giving you:
- Fully amphibious birds, capable of high-quality flight and penguin-like submerged acrobatics.
- Birds with separate 'thrust' and 'lift' wings (which, incidentally, would, by my understanding, allow them to bypass the number one obstacle to really big flying critters.)
- Soaring birds that can switch to high speed flight, fast birds that can also switch and turn on a dime, etc.
- All four wings doing the same function, which would both allow flight in birds that would otherwise be too heavy and clunky and give passerines, hawks, and the like a truly terrifying degree of agility - seeing as their bag of tricks at least potentially combines not just everything birds have come up with, but everything seen in dragonflies, as well.
- Backadaptation into any of the physical types seen in real birds would be quite possible.
Disadvantages?
I'm not sure. Takeoff would probably be a pain, especially from a level surface. Getting around on the ground would likely look pretty ugly, though it might actually work better than you'd expect.
Likely I'm missing a lot - anyone have ideas?
===============================================
"Reseeestunce ees fiutil. Yoo weeel bee Useemooletud. Borg Borg Borg."
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Rather than two wings, like pterosaurs, bats, and just about every other flying vertebrate ever, consider a possible ancestor species which, like flying squirrels, uses all four of its limbs equally in flight and on the ground.
Advantages of such a scheme: primarily, that the amount of wing surface proportional to the 'infrastructure organ' (digestion, brain, etc.) is higher - power-to-weight is better, which has obvious applications for just about any flying critter.
Also, each pair of wings can, when needful, be specialized for different purposes, giving you:
- Fully amphibious birds, capable of high-quality flight and penguin-like submerged acrobatics.
- Birds with separate 'thrust' and 'lift' wings (which, incidentally, would, by my understanding, allow them to bypass the number one obstacle to really big flying critters.)
- Soaring birds that can switch to high speed flight, fast birds that can also switch and turn on a dime, etc.
- All four wings doing the same function, which would both allow flight in birds that would otherwise be too heavy and clunky and give passerines, hawks, and the like a truly terrifying degree of agility - seeing as their bag of tricks at least potentially combines not just everything birds have come up with, but everything seen in dragonflies, as well.
- Backadaptation into any of the physical types seen in real birds would be quite possible.
Disadvantages?
I'm not sure. Takeoff would probably be a pain, especially from a level surface. Getting around on the ground would likely look pretty ugly, though it might actually work better than you'd expect.
Likely I'm missing a lot - anyone have ideas?
===============================================
"Reseeestunce ees fiutil. Yoo weeel bee Useemooletud. Borg Borg Borg."
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."