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Exactly. Real pioneers like Sir George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Dr. Langley, and Otto Lilienthal studied bird wings, and extensively documented their studies. No mention of boomerangs.

You forgot F. W. Lanchester.

He obtained the equations of flight and aerodynamic equations by watching the path of small gliders above a long kitchen table. Identifying flight...stall and recovery he obtained the equations from graphs of the flight path and fit the equations to the graph. I can post images from his notebooks and patents...all his materials reside in the Launchester Library of Coventry University UK.