Israeli-led discovery redefines how dinosaurs took flight

New research is challenging long-held assumptions about how flight evolved in dinosaurs and birds, according to a study published on Tuesday in Communications Biology.

Yosef Kiat of Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History led an international team that examined 160-million-year-old fossils and found that some feathered dinosaurs had lost the ability to fly—suggesting the path to flight was more complex than scientists believed.

The research focused on nine exceptionally preserved fossils of Anchiornis, a feathered dinosaur species from eastern China...