Flying Primates!

No, neither bats nor Oz- ean Winged Monkeys. In a fascinating post, Darren examines Madagascar's sifakas and their-- aparently known, but not well known, (despite the fact, pointed out to me by Darren for the first time, that it is noted in standards like my '83 edition of Walker's Mammals of the World) ability to glide.

This also has implications for the evolution of flight in birds. Darren says:

"As hinted at by the fact that it’s not much mentioned in the books, the supposed gliding habits of sifakas and other primates are not as well known among mammalogists as they might be. In fact these habits have been most widely brought to attention in the literature on bird origins. Rightly or wrongly, the debate over avian origins has long been dichotomized into a ‘ground up’ school, and a ‘trees down’ school. It is absolutely wrong to argue – as some workers have – that the ‘trees down’ theory is at odds with the very robust and well supported body of evidence showing that birds are theropod dinosaurs, given that basal birds, and the theropods closest to birds, were apparently small-bodied proficient tree climbers, and not big cursorial Deinonychus-like predators as some would have it. If small, scampering scansorial predators were the ancestors of birds, I find the evidence to better support the idea that flight evolved in the trees, and I’ve argued such in some not particularly good, and much overlooked, articles (Naish 2000a, b).

"What have gliding lemurs got to do with all this, I hear you ask. Alan Feduccia, the ornithologist who should be best known for his work on Neotropical passerines but is unfortunately far better known for his various attempts to poke holes in the bird-dinosaur theory, has repeatedly used sifakas and other gliding primates as models for the early stages in the development of avian flight (Feduccia 1993, 1995, 1996, Geist & Feduccia 2000). In other words, Feduccia proposed that sifakas might serve as an analogy illustrating how feathers and flight might have evolved from leaping arboreal prototypes."

Definitely a RTWT. Incidentally, to those of us who have followed the dino- bird connections over the years, the phrase "who should be best known for his work on Neotropical passerines but is unfortunately far better known for his various attempts to poke holes in the bird-dinosaur theory" is both subtle and hilarious.