Lily Burton writes:

Flight may be one of evolution’s most iconic innovations, but zoologist Piotr Jablonski is convinced that early wings were first meant to be seen, not to fly.

The idea came to Jablonski after studying bird behavior in the American West. He noticed some birds would fling out their wings or fan out their tail feathers to lure insects into the open. Then the birds would catch and eat the bugs. If early winged dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds, maybe the dinos did the same, he thought.

For years, Jablonski and his colleagues have been putting that idea to the test, showing robotic and computer-simulated dinosaurs to real insects and recording their brain activity. The approach may seem unconventional, but the team is part of a growing group of scientists who want to experimentally reconstruct what remains elusive: how long-extinct animals behaved. [Continue reading…]