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In Greek mythology, the winged horse Pegasus was ridden by the hero Bellerophon to defeat the fearsome Chimera, a beast often depicted as being part goat, part lion and part snake. More recently, the steed appeared in the popular Disney film Hercules as a companion to the main character whose ability to fly helps Hercules become a true hero.

While often portrayed as having modest-sized wings, a paper by a group of students from the has calculated the minimum size Pegasus's wings would realistically need to be in order to fly.

If Pegasus was the same size and weight as a regular horse, the students suggest that a minimum wing size of roughly eight meters squared would be needed for flight - and if the wings were the same width as Pegasus's body length (roughly 1.5m) this would give a tip to tip wing-span longer than a double decker bus.

The results were found using a simplified model of flight involving the use of a ratio known as the 'Strouhal number'. This relates the speed at which a wing flaps to the flight speed and the height the wings reach. It was found in a separate study that all flying animals have a Strouhal number between 0.2 and 0.4.

The paper suggests that in order for Pegasus to have helped the heroes of Ancient Greece, it would need to have experienced a serious growth spurt in its body size or wing span.