John McDonald, age 13, of St. Louis, Missouri for his question:

What sort of birds first learned to fly?

Chances are, you. would have mistaken one of these early birds for a dragon. No, he did not give rise to the legendary dragon for he and his outlandish kinfolk departed many millions of years before our ancestors arrived on the earth. But if human eyes had been there to behold them, the first flying birds certainly would have made a staggering impression.

Most of the evidence of bygone animals comes from fossils preserved in the ground. Naturally the most durable ones were left by big, bulky animals with sturdy bones. Birds must be rather lightweight, fragile boned creatures in order to take to the air. For this reason, fewer bird fossils have withstood the crustal weight and pressure through millions of years. Most of their fossils are imprints left when their delicate bodies were sealed and preserved in layers of ancient mud. They have been dated and restructured to give a rather sketchy story of the first flying birds.

The earliest bird fossil known was unearthed in a Bavarian slate quarry. His skeleton and skull are preserved in detail, together with the feathery impressions of all his plumage. Radioactive dating places his era in the late Jurassic Period, about 150 million years ago. He was promptly updated with a modern name    Archaeopteryx, meaning the ancient winged one. Later, the fossil skeletons of several of his close kinfolk were found in the same area. Obviously the archaeopteryx was no surprise to the astonishing assortment of dinosaurs that shared his world.

In fact, his ancestors were qualified members of the dinosaur clan. However, he himself was a warm blooded,.feathered creature and not related to the scaly, cold¬blooded reptiles. But his chicken sized body had unmistakable reptile features. His lizard shaped head had a long snout with long toothy jaws. He had a very long snaky tail, bordered with rows of stiff feathers. The arm bones that supported his wings ended in three clawed fingers. His body was feathered and his wings were covered with large, stiff quill feathers. His legs were long and strong.

Nobody knows how well he flew on his stiff feathered, rounded wings. But certainly he was an excellent two legged runner on the ground. Some experts suspect that his aerial activities were limited to gliding, perhaps somewhat like the gliding, planing flights of our flying squirrels. Possibly he used his clawed feet and the clawed fingers on his wings to scramble up steep cliffs or lofty trees. From such perches, the archaeopterdactyl certainly was equipped to take a long, gliding planing flight down through the air.

The fossil evidence suggests that nature soon discarded him. However, a variety of leathery winged reptiles also took to the air during the Jurassic Period. They were the pterodactyls    who also failed to survive. The ancestors of our modern warm blooded, feathery birds arrived about 135 million years ago and their wondrous success was firmly established during the Cretaceous Period that ended about 60 million years ago.