On 8 July, 2011, the Public Lecture talked about the theme of flying dinosaurs and was presented by Dr. Zhang Yuguang, BMNH paleontologist and associate researcher.

Those that can fly appeared in the long past and are still around today. From the small dragonflies, butterflies, flies and mosquitoes to the medium-sized bats and flying squirrels to the large airplanes, rockets and spaceships, they are all capable of flight but are not the flying dinosaurs. In the past geological times, such ancient reptiles as pterosaurs and pterodactyls could fly in the sky but they would not be properly called flying dinosaurs since they were just close relatives to the dinosaur group.

The flying dinosaurs, as dinosaurs, must have the physical structure features of reptilian dinosaurs, and they should have characteristics similar to those of the modern birds such as the feathers, skeletons, arboreal tendency and flying capability. Birds, as more and more studies show, evolved from dinosaurs. Some birds became extinct, leaving evidence of their existence in the fossils, and were named archaeornithes, including the famous archaeopteryx discovered in Germany and the Sinornis santensis found in western Liaoning of China; and modern birds such as egrets and eagles evolved from archaeornithes and, since the dinosaurs became extinct and modern birds are their offspring, we call modern birds ‘the flying dinosaurs’ today.