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You claim it is simple. . . Just give the bird larger wings. Problem solved! BroJoeK, don't you realize that the WINGS are made of material that has MASS???? As you increase the size of the wing, the mass of that wing increases by the cube of the multiplier! Double the wing size, the weight of the wing itself goes up by EIGHT times, before we even talk about the body of the animal! Three times larger, the volume and mass is TWENTY-SEVEN times greater! Quadruple the wing size, and the weight of the wing alone increases by SIXTY-FOUR times what it was!!!!

This is something you cannot get around. That is why this is the square-cube LAW of mathematics. . . There is a point of diminishing returns. A point at which your square foot of wing weighs more than the five pounds of lift it can generate simply because it is NOT gossamer thin and made out of wishful thinking and Unicorn farts and no amount of added wing will help! Are you going to fill these wings with Hydrogen or Helium???

You claim that I'm working the math backwards. . . Taking the wingspan and calculating the mass (not weight) of the bird from that. . . Patently absurd. It's the other way around. We know what the extinct bird massed because we KNOW what the square-cube LAW tells us it must mass. . . Given the size of the bird and the mass of modern birds that are identical in every way except size. You plug in THEIR mass, apply the mathematical formula FROM THE LAW, and the answer is the mass of the extinct bird. No, you don't magically increase their wing span or lower their mass to fit your preconceived notions of what it needs to fly. It is what it is. That's called fudging your answer to make it fit because YOU don't like the implications. It's cheating, "massaging" the data to get the results you expect, instead of following the science to see where it leads. That's what the Global Warming crowd did with their models when THEY didn't get what they wanted For THEIR agenda!

The strength of the muscles to move that mass only increase by something less than the square. . . Because muscular strength is a function of the cross sectional area, not the mass. . . and, in fact, the greater the mass, the greater the inertia that the muscles must overcome to initiate, then stop movement. . . The greater the intramuscular heat generated, but there's only an inverse ratio of cooling area to dissipate the heat generated by the moving muscles. More problems.

You mentioned hang-gliders. Show me a hang-glider with bones, muscles, and sinews, filling the INSIDE the nylon skin, or conversely, show me a bird with a wing that is the equivalent of that nylon cloth, a few thousands of a inch thick that merely stretches to catch the wind and is FIXED in place. . . then tell me it's the same. Show me the flight muscles of that hang-glider that has articulated, flapping wings that can stoop, or remain stationary in place by sculling the air with its flight feathers, and show me a hang-glider that takes off with its own power from the ground. . . and tell me about all about how that's the same thing. . . Or admit you really don't know what you are talking about.