Kind: captions
Language: en
today bird flight is spectacularly
complex they soar with ease but the
transition from a groundbased life to
one in the skies would not have been an
easy one it's something that scientists
are still trying to understand how did
birds First Take
Flight there are several ideas of how
this
happened the first known as the tree
down hypothesis suggests that tree
dwelling Birds flap their Wings to
cushion their Landing the second known
as the ground up hypothesis emphasizes
the use of wing flapping associated with
running to escape danger or catch up
with
[Music]
prey but recently another theory has
been suggested one that can be seen in
birds
[Music]
today so these are our performers today
this is Olympia and Greg this is Annie
in brown and this is Twinkle jamaa or
Twinkie for short to analyze the
movement of the Wings in detail
evolutionary biologist Ashley hers needs
to see them in slow motion here I've got
my highspeed video camera and I can
visualize what the camera is seeing on
the
laptop so you can see that she's really
using her wings to break as she gets
ready to lay on there I actually spend a
lot of my time working with developing
birds or baby birds because it can also
tell us a lot about the evolution of
life and in many ways they look similar
to some of the fossils that we see that
are documenting this origin of flight
and so in these developing Birds we have
this really interesting system where we
can see in real time how a living animal
goes from a flightless animal to a
flight capable animal and everything
that happens in between both
anatomically and
behaviorally one of the behaviors seen
is when being assisted running on an
inclin plane so on the left here we have
a four deal tricker Partridge it is
flapping its wings to really drive
itself into the substrate here and
increase traction with its feet so that
it can Ascend this deep incline this is
not the only behavior that hints that
dinosaurs were able to develop flapping
flight they may use their wings to LEAP
into the air and fly either for a very
short distance or for thousands of miles
they also use their wings to down out of
trees or off of elevated surfaces even
to swim either across the water or below
the water and so living birds show us
that you know they use lots of different
habitats and they use their wings for
lots of different
functions bird flight developed as an
adaptation to the environment as well as
to allow gliding down from trees or to
evade Predators on land