Washington - The early flying dinosaur probably spread two pairs of feathered wings like early aviation's biplane to glide between trees, according to a study released on Monday.
With long feathers on its arms and legs, the small four-winged Microraptor would drop from its perch, swoop back up and fly up and down in an undulating motion from tree to tree, the study said.
The bird's ancestor could potentially cover a distance of at least 40m, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It seems likely that Microraptor invented the biplane 125 million years before the Wright 1903 Flyer," wrote research authors Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and Canadian collaborator Jack Templin, who used a computer simulation to study possible flight patterns.
The 77cm tree-dwelling dinosaur, which
weighed nearly one kilogram, also had a long feathered tail offering additional flight and stability and controlled pitch, the study said.
Chatterjee and Templin's conclusions are an alternative to an initial assessment of the fossils that found that the Microraptor flew like a dragonfly, spreading its legs out laterally and
maintaining its wings in a tandem pattern.
But the dragonfly theory would not have given the dinosaur suitable lift or enabled it to walk on the ground, Chatterjee and Templin said.
Their research found that the leg wings were probably under the body with the top wings slightly ahead like a biplane. By gliding, the dinosaur also saved a lot of energy.
"Merely by stretching both its wings, Microraptor would have been able to glide in much the same way as a mechanical glider without muscle power," the study said.
The fossils of "Microraptor gui", a dromaesaur, were discovered among hundreds of small, well preserved feathered theropods from the Early Crestaceous Jehol Group of north-eastern China. - Sapa-AFP