Independent origins of powered flight in paravian dinosaurs?

Abstract

Feathered dinosaurs discovered during the last decades have illuminated the transition from land to air in these animals, underscoring a significant degree of experimentation in wing-assisted locomotion around the origin of birds. Such evolutionary experimentation led to lineages achieving either wing-assisted running, four-winged gliding, or membrane-winged gliding. Birds are widely accepted as the only dinosaur lineage that achieved powered flight, a key innovation for their evolutionary success. However, in a recent paper in Current Biology, Pei and colleagues¹ disputed this view. They concluded that three other lineages of paravian dinosaurs (those more closely related to birds than to oviraptorosaurs) - Unenlagiinae, Microraptorinae and Anchiornithinae - could have evolved powered flight independently. While we praise the detailed phylogenetic framework of Pei and colleagues¹ and welcome a new attempt to understand the onset of flight in dinosaurs, we here expose a set of arguments that significantly weaken their evidence supporting a multiple origin of powered flight. Specifically, we maintain that the two proxies used by Pei and colleagues¹ to assess powered flight potential in non-avian paravians - wing loading and specific lift - fail to discriminate between powered flight (thrust generated by flapping) and passive flight (gliding).