Researchers have worked out how rib-extensions helped a 225 million year old reptile glide through the air, with a little help from a wind tunnel.

Although the weird rib-growths of Kuehneosuchus and Kuehneosaurus were long thought to be related to flight it was not clear how they worked, says Koen Stein, who did the work when a palaeobiology student at the University of Bristol in the UK.

As LiveScience points out, a clue may come from modern flying dragons, which use membranes strung between moveable ribs for gliding. To help understand the flight of the two Kuehns, Stein and colleagues built models of the two very similar reptiles and stuck them in a wind tunnel.

“Surprisingly, we found that Kuehneosuchus was aerodynamically very stable,” he says (press release). “Jumping from a five-metre tree, it could easily have crossed nine metres distance before landing on the ground. The other form, Kuehneosaurus, was more of a parachutist than a glider.”

Kuehneosuchus and Kuehneosaurus may be male and females forms of the same species, according to Stein. The former may have been male and used its gliding and highly coloured wings in a mating display to the latter, speculate the researchers in the paper in Palaeontology.

Headline watch

Dino-soar is first ‘bird’ in world – Sun

More coverage

Scientists discover ’world’s first bird’ that lived 235million years ago – Daily Mail

Reptiles ‘used to glide from trees’ – PA

Image: Georg Olechinski.