All Wings Considered

We’re catching some air this week, and talking things with wings!  

Quandaries range from the practical (how do different animal and insect wings differ?) to the ethereal (this includes dragons). Here’s the questions we’ll be answering…

1. What makes wings different?
2. How have wings in nature inspired human flight? 
3. Did we ever solve the colony collapse problem with bees?
4. Why do so many cultures have dragon myths?

Featuring Jonathan Rader, Tim Burbery, Lauren Ponisio, and Andrew Howley. 

For full credits and transcript, visit outsideinradio.org.

For our next Outside/Inbox roundup, we’re looking for questions about healing! We’re casting a wide net here: homeopathy, neuroplasticity, chronic disease, plant resiliency. … Send us your questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and emailing that to us at outsidein@nhpr.org.  Or you can call our hotline: 844-GO-OTTER.

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LINKS

The video of the sandhill crane landing lives on TikTok. 

Here’s that video of an albatross walking on land after years at sea. 

Timothy Burbery is the author of Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events.

The hypothesis connecting the mythical griffin and Protoceratops fossils was popularized by Adrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times.

Here's a paper critiquing Mayor's interpretations, "Did the horned dinosaur Protoceratops inspire the griffin?"

A USGS volcanologist on what geologists missed for so long in the stories of Pele, from indigenous Hawaiian oral tradition.