Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

So fantasy dragons and Avatar notwithstanding, six limbs on a land dweller is pretty weird. I'm going to have to question this creature either being real or actually having four-wings and a pair of legs.

http://www.thegeektwins.com/2010/06/flawed-science-of-avatar...

edit Looking a bit more into it, it looks like the artist's picture is a hopeful fantasy. The class of animals were more like flying squirrels in the sense that they used their hind legs for lift as well. So they're four limbed animals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microraptor



Dinosaurs are part of the tetrapod clade, so I never expected "four-winged" to mean anything other than that the hind limbs and forelimbs are both feathered and used for flight. That's what the artist's conception based on the discovered fossils shows.


Oh wow. I think I need more coffee. The first few times I looked at the artist's rendering, I swear I thought it was a 4 winged, two legged animal. But you're right, they rendered it as a tetrapod.


The drawing is very confusing. It looks as if the back wings are just obscuring clawed legs rather than being the legs themselves. I had exactly the same thought as you and came here to comment the same thing.


Flight of the Dragons postulates a four-limbed winged dragon, with wings evolving from ribs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_%28book%2...


It's also a fiction book.


Draco volans has rib-wings, though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_volans


Did they change the artist's picture or something? The image I see in the article shows 4 limbs, all of them wings.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: