A young ostrich sprints down a path at a Chinese farm. His neck bobs, his legs pump — and the artificial wings attached to his back flap up and down.

Alas, this ostrich will not fly. He’s filling in for another earthbound creature, a dinosaur called Caudipteryx. Some 125 million years ago, this theropod walked on two legs and bore a pair of feathery “proto-wings,” similar to the fake ones worn by the ostrich. Recently, researchers set out to study the long-extinct creature as they took on one of the greatest controversies in paleontology: how avian flight first evolved.

In a study published Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology, a team including mechanical engineer Jing-Shan Zhao and several paleontologists used the outfitted ostrich — along with mathematical and robot models — to argue that when Caudipteryx ran, its mini-wings flapped involuntarily. Eventually, the researchers proposed, the dinosaur’s descendants would have harnessed this trait and taken off from the ground for the first time.

Other experts are less than convinced, arguing that the study’s analogues don’t do justice to the complexity of the animal it purports to study. But the disagreement itself highlights the unsettled nature of debates over the evolution of flight among the world’s feathered inhabitants.