Pharyngula

Posted by: Kitty | March 22, 2006 7:05 AM

Speaking of mechanically improbable animals, have you seen this new sauropod? When I first saw the reconstruction, I was wondering how it didn't fall on its face, but of course its neck was full of air sacs...animals are so weird!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0321_060321_dinosaur_neck.html

Posted by: Jeff Fecke | March 22, 2006 7:26 AM

Coincidentally, Ben Domenech's head is also filled with air sacs.

Posted by: BronzeDog | March 22, 2006 7:50 AM

[Humor]
This proves that the Entellijunt Designer exists, and that he works for Lockheed.
[/Humor]

Posted by: aiabx | March 22, 2006 9:29 AM

What really scares me is that this creature was clearly optimized for supersonic flight.

Posted by: Lillen | March 22, 2006 9:53 AM

Not to be a Messerschmitt about swedish airplanes, but this little bugger looks more like our older "Viggen". A "Gripen" has more recemblance to a groundhog, or maybe a badger - both earthdigging animals. And of course, the thing that looks like a tail must be the artists misinterpretation of the exhaust jet, don´t you think.

Posted by: N.Wells | March 22, 2006 10:12 AM

I apologize for a nit-pick that perhaps is not even necessary, but although Sharovipteryx is a pre-pterosaur in the chronological sense (it's Early Triassic, whereas the oldest pterosaur known so far is Late Triassic), it isn't a pre-pterosaur in the evolutionary, ancestor-descendant sense (it's a prolacertiform archosauromorph, a bit off to the side of whatever line led to pterosaurs).

Posted by: wamba | March 22, 2006 10:43 AM

That I can recognize old military hardware is yet another strike against my liberal cred, isn't it?

Trade-off. Appreciating cool gadgets increases your geek cred. It's just unfortunate that many really cool gadgets were designed to kill people.

Posted by: Torbjorn Larsson | March 22, 2006 12:29 PM

"I wonder how many times they crashed during development."

If they were like Viggen, many. IIRC, it has a worse than average accident record for a fighter plane, especially during development.

OTOH, Gripen, who is a partly unstable fastturning plane, has actually a far better record, if memory serves. Its electronics, which is keeping it together, is very good.

It's just that the development was done on a shoestring budget (a fifth of a US fighter development, IIRC), so the crashes were spectacularly disturbing for the industry. And yes, great television, too. :-)

Posted by: Torbjorn Larsson | March 22, 2006 4:19 PM

i don't know if it's a series, but Poul Anderson has such a species in his "People of the wind". He made a lot of speculations on specific evolutionary adaptions that made his flying species presumably able to go above our birds in weight. They usually had to make a handstance to free the wings for flying.

Posted by: wamba | March 23, 2006 8:41 AM

Wing membranes on the hindlimbs, eh? I seem to recall a series of science fiction stories (author forgotten) that included a race of intelligent hind-wing fliers. Having the wings on the hindlimbs left the forelimbs free to evolve for manipulation.

Such compromises would be unnecessary if we weren't trapped in the tetrapod body plan.

Posted by: David Peters | October 9, 2006 2:21 PM

This is a poor approximation of a Sharovipteryx. There was a canard, but this one is imaginary, as the authors stated (so why did they write the paper??). The real canard extended posteriorly from the front limbs, just as in pterosaurs, with a small membrane anchored by a tiny pteroid back to the quite large deltopectoral crest of the humerus. Sharov found some traces of fingers more than 35 years ago. They've been essentially ignored ever since. The ilium is greatly extended both fore and aft anchoring much larger thigh muscles than shown here (how could these be missed??), plus the creature had prepubes. See one of the 2006 issues of Prehistoric Times for a more precise account of all this. This was one cousin of the leaping four-winged forms that eventually led to pterosaurs.