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Ancient clues helped an Ohio University researcher study how animals learned to fly

By: David Forster
Posted on: Friday, May 1, 2026

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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Scientists for centuries have looked for an answer to what seems on the surface to be a simple question: How did animals learn to fly?

Larry Witmer is a professor of anatomy and the Chang Ying-Chien Professor of Paleontology at Ohio University. He co-authored a recent study that sheds new light on the development of flight in the animal world. It builds on some groundbreaking research Witmer and others did decades ago.

He sat down to speak with WOUB’s David Forster for “Modern Science.”

On tracking evolution and animal flight

“Vertebrates, backboned animals have evolved flight three times. We know about birds, we know about bats. But there was this very early evolution of flight in pterosaurs. A lot of people have studied what happens with the wings, the aerodynamics and how that evolved. One thing we never really looked at was, in a sense, the evolution of the flight computer, the brain.

“We had some really nice fossils and we used a new technology called micro CT scanning, which allowed us to peer inside, through the bone, through the rock in which these fossils were entombed. Then we used high powered software to fill up the the space in the skull where the brain was. That gave us something that we call a brain endocast, a cast of the inside. That actually showed us a new view of what the brains of these pterosaurs were like. That’s kind of where things stood for a long time.”

How pterosaurs moved animal flight research along

“One of the things we found from our early studies of pterosaur brains is that they were sort of bird like in in a lot of ways, but they were actually smaller than what we see birds. We have a joke about ‘bird brains.’ Birds actually have pretty large brains. But pterosaurs had vaguely bird-like brains in some ways, but they were smaller. The big problem we had is that pterosaurs seemed to come out of nowhere. We don’t really have any transitional fossils.”

On the long wait for the next discovery

“We’d been waiting for a while. And someone like me, who is a fairly lab-based paleontologist, often has to wait around until the folks that are actually traipsing through the badlands, in this case of Brazil, actually happened upon the 233 million-year-old fossils of a group of animals called Lagerpetidaes. They were basically on the line to pterosaurs.”

Lagerpetidaes  couldn’t fly but offered signs of flight evolution

“The story that emerged is that pterosaurs as they were evolving their wings were simultaneously developing the neural centers, the flight computer in their skull that was also being associated with flight. That’s a distinction from the evolution of birds, where birds basically inherited their brains and then they started to fly. Pterosaurs were in a sense developing the entire flight apparatus, not just the wings, but also their brains at the same time.”

On what the new research discovered about the brain and animal flight

“A lot of the actual mechanics of flight are actually governed by reflexes that take place in the spinal cord and the brainstem. Once you start to develop the aerodynamic components, wings and things like that, then that’s actually probably the main thing. Once you’ve developed that, you can probably fly pretty well. You need to start to then hone the neural component to handle sort of the tricky parts of flight. Flight itself is pretty easy. Airplanes do pretty well at flying. The challenge that animals and aircraft have is actually taking off and landing. Those are the two hardest parts. Probably a lot of the the development of the brain that we see in pterosaurs and birds was probably initially just to help with takeoff and landing.”

The first draft of the transcript used for this story was created in Adobe Podcast, which includes an AI transcription tool. A WOUB News Editor then reviewed, corrected and reformatted the transcript before publication.