Battleangel

One relating to the link between dinosaurs and birds, and the other the relating to pterosaur flight.

NewScientist - Palaeobiologists could not explain how the creatures could take off from a standing start – rather than soaring, glider-like, from a clifftop - or how they had enough lift to slow down for a non-bone-crunching landing. Yet fossilised pterosaur tracks show that they could do both.

Now a team led by zoologist Matthew Wilkinson of the animal flight group at the University of Cambridge, UK, thinks the pterosaurs used a moveable forewing. They say earlier lift calculations were skewed by misconceptions about the way this forewing moved.

BBC - Buitreraptor gonzalezorum, from the Neuquén Basin in central Argentina may provide tantalising evidence that powered flight evolved twice.

One theory suggests the lineage of dinosaurs the new animal belonged to, the dromaeosaurs, originated in the Cretaceous Period (144 to 65 mya). But this discovery suggests their lineage can be traced further back in time, to the Jurassic (206 to 144 mya).

So, BBC bungles up the concept a bit, mixing birds and dinosaurs, instead of just plainly saying that Laurasian dromaeosaurids and Gondwanan dromaeosaurids both evolved powered flight separated in time and space. Or what is sometimes referred to as parallel evolution, i.e. development of similarities in separate but related evolutionary lineages through the operation of similar selective factors on both lines.