Flying A Great Bird

One of the questions that appears time and again with giant flying animals is "How do they get off the ground and how do they stay off the ground?" Because that is a popular theme with large flying animals, the first hit in a paper search for Argentavis is Chaterjee, et al. 2007: The aerodynamics of Argentavis, the world's largest flying bird from the Miocene of Argentina. The author's conclusions are centered around the hypothesized aspect ratio of the wing and estimated body weight. These parameters lead them to conclude that Argentavis was most likely similar to extant vultures and large condors in that it was probably not capable of sustained powered flight, instead choosing to use thermal soaring as its preferred method of staying airborne. Intermittent powered flapping would have been used as it is by these extant analogues as a secondary anti-stall measure but not as a power source for extended flight. This paper builds off of the new data and goes into more computer simulation than Vizcaino and and Farina1999, which initially tackled the problems of Argentavis flight without computer simulations, instead, it appears, relying on estimates of body size and inferred wing shape and comparing these with extant animals and known aerodynamic principals; the full text is not available anywhere online and what I have inferred comes from the abstract found here. The final article I will mention today addresses ecology (and reproduction). Palmqvist and Vizcaino 2003 details ranges, needed amounts of food, airspeeds, and clutch size to determine the ecological impacts and roles of Argentavis. Instead of spoiling this paper by writing in those facts, as I did above to a slight degree, I am going to simply encourage everyone to read and discover the paper's findings for themselves here. I find the paper to be interesting and find myself wondering if anyone would refute any of these findings; I have yet to find a paper that does so (I admit my search is short right now though).