Middle Triassic fossils reveal how flying fish started to glide
Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - 15:50
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Modern flying fish are remarkable for leaping from the water to glide in the air using long, winglike fins, presumably to escape aquatic predators. This extraordinary gliding strategy, unlike those in terrestrial gliders, is energetically very expensive and has otherwise been hypothesized to occur only in a single stem group of the Neopterygii, the Thoracopteridae from the Late Triassic of Austria and Italy and Middle Triassic of South China. The evolutionary origin of the overwater gliding strategy was poorly known in the thoracopterids, since there is little in the way of missing-link fossils to illuminate how these fish evolved flight.