Flying Squirrel

Bell and Gray filed telephone patents within three hours of each other on February 14, 1876. Nature ran this experiment 160 million years earlier. Flying squirrels and sugar gliders—separated by continental drift, mammalian class, and geological time—invented the same solution to the same problem: skin membranes stretched between limbs to glide through forest canopies.

Flying squirrels are nocturnal rodents defined by a single adaptation: the patagium, a thin membrane of skin stretching from wrist to ankle that transforms falling into controlled flight. This is convergent evolution, biology's proof that some problems have dominant solutions. Faced with dense forest environments where climbing down trees to cross gaps burns time and exposes prey to ground predators, both flying squirrels (placental mammals) and sugar gliders (marsupials) independently evolved this solution. They developed matching large eyes for nocturnal foraging. They acquired similar body proportions for optimal glide ratios. Same constraints, same physics, same answer.

The parallel to business is multiple independent invention: nine people independently invented the telescope, five invented the telegraph, three invented the transistor within years of each other. The "adjacent possible" concept explains why: when foundational technologies and knowledge accumulate to a certain point, the next logical step becomes obvious to multiple observers. This creates path dependence in innovation—once certain prerequisites exist, particular solutions become nearly inevitable.

This matters for first-mover strategy. Neither flying squirrel nor sugar glider "arrived first" at gliding—both evolved the solution when their ecological conditions demanded it. Similarly, Uber and Lyft launched within a year of each other. Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster all recognized social networking's potential within a few years. When conditions are ripe, expect simultaneous invention.

Flying squirrels glide distances averaging 60 feet, with recorded flights up to 150 feet. They achieve glide ratios of 1.98—covering nearly two horizontal feet for every foot of drop. Research published in 2025 shows this performance is so effective that South Korean engineers built a flying squirrel-inspired drone with foldable wings that achieves rapid deceleration by mimicking how squirrels spread their membranes before landing. Sugar gliders evolved similar capabilities but with key differences: flying squirrels generate more lift and less drag due to their more developed propatagium (forewing structure). Convergent evolution doesn't produce identical copies; it produces functionally similar but mechanically distinct solutions—which is exactly what we see when comparing Visa's and Mastercard's payment networks, or Delta's and United's hub-and-spoke operations.

Business parallels show the same pattern. Apple's iOS and Google's Android solved mobile computing with different architectures but convergent functionality—both arrived at touchscreens, app stores, and gesture navigation because those were the dominant solutions to smartphone constraints. Visa and Mastercard compete with nearly identical business models because the card payment problem has a dominant solution. When you see two competitors with surprisingly similar approaches, you're not necessarily witnessing imitation—you may be witnessing convergent strategy.

The flying squirrel's lesson: if your innovation is an obvious response to clear constraints, someone else is probably building it too. First-mover advantage matters less than execution advantage when the adjacent possible has multiple tenants. The Biology of Business framework explores dozens of such convergent patterns—from colonial organisms to predator-prey dynamics—revealing why companies facing similar constraints reliably discover similar solutions. For more on convergent strategy, see the companion page on sugar gliders.