S. Gazan: The Dinosaur Feather

They remained at the window for nearly two hours. Dr. Tybjerg asked Anna to reconstruct the skeleton after having demonstrated it to her a couple of times. She had to be familiar with the many reductions and adaptations of the bird skeleton in order to appreciate the dispute that would be the subject of her dissertation, Dr. Tybjerg stressed. A group of expert ornithologists led by the well-known scientist, Clive Freeman—had Anna heard of him?—still refused to accept that birds were present-day dinosaurs. Anna nodded. Clive Freeman was professor of paleoornithology at the department of Bird Evolution, Paleobiology, and Systematics at the University of British Columbia, and he had published several major and respected works on birds.

“He is a very good ornithologist,” Dr. Tybjerg emphasized. “He really knows his stuff. And if you’re to have the slightest hope of demolishing his argument, you need to be conversant with those areas of avian anatomy and physiology to which Freeman constantly refers, and on which he bases his totally absurd claim that birds aren’t dinosaurs.”

Dr. Tybjerg stared into the distance. Professor Freeman and his team had no scientific grounds on which to base their argument, he went on, as fossils and recognized systems of taxonomy confirmed the close relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

“And yet they persist.” Dr. Tybjerg fixed Anna’s gaze, and his eyes narrowed. “Why?”

Anna sat with the coracoids and tried to figure out which one would fit into the sternum.

Dr. Tybjerg seemed to approve of her choice by passing her a scapula. As he gave her the bone, he looked at her urgently and prompted, “Two hundred and eighty-six apomorphies.”

“Sorry?”

“They dismiss two hundred and eight-six apomorphies.”

Anna gulped. Now what was an apomorphy again? Tybjerg twirled a small, sharp bone between his fingers.

“You need to review all of their arguments and all of ours,” he said. “Pair them up and go through them. Once and for all. Together we will wipe the floor with him.” Coming from Tybjerg, this expression sounded odd. Anna looked out at the University Park.

“We’ll publish a small book,” he added. “A manifesto of some kind. The ultimate proof.” He stared triumphantly toward the ceiling.

Anna had gotten up to leave when Dr. Tybjerg suddenly said, “By the way…” and tossed a key across the table. It seemed as if it had slipped out of his sleeve. Anna caught it and, without looking at her, Dr. Tybjerg said:

“I did not just give you a master key.”

Anna quickly pocketed the key and said: “No, you certainly didn’t.”

Dr. Tybjerg had entrusted her with a key that was normally forbidden to students. Now every door was open to her.

Anna’s curiosity was rekindled as she left the museum. She asked Johannes about Tybjerg.

“A lot of people don’t like him,” was his immediate reaction.

“Why?” Anna was genuinely surprised. Johannes suddenly looked as if he was having second thoughts.

“I don’t want to be seen as a tattler,” he said, eventually.

“For God’s sake, Johannes, give me a break,” Anna exclaimed.

He thought it over. “Okay,” he said. “But I’ll make it brief. Word has it Tybjerg is an insanely gifted scientist. He was hired by the museum to keep track of their collections when he was still a schoolboy. He’s supposed to have a photographic memory, but he’s socially inept and really quite unpopular. For years Tybjerg and Helland have been some sort of team…” He wrinkled his nose. “When he was younger, he taught undergraduates. In fact, he used to teach me. But there were complaints.”

“Why?”

“He can’t teach,” Johannes declared.

“That’s weird,” she said. “I’ve just spent all afternoon with him, and I thought he explained things really well.”

“Not to a classroom full of students. He gets nervous and he drones on as if he were reading aloud from some long, convoluted text he knows by heart. I think he’s a bit nuts, I mean, seriously. They only keep him on because he knows everything there is to know about the Vertebrate Collection. More than anyone in the whole world. It’s like hiring someone with autism to look after a vast record collection. He knows where everything is and what it’s called. But they would never offer him tenure. To be employed by the University of Copenhagen, you have to be able to teach.” He paused before he added: “Dr. Tybjerg is weirder than most.”

Anna rested her head on her keyboard.

“Lucky me, or what?”

“What do you mean?”

“One of my supervisors is useless and the other one is a weirdo.”

“Don’t start all that again,” Johannes said. “We’ve already been there. Helland’s all right.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Yes, and I would rather you didn’t.”

To begin with, every word and every scientific argument in the controversy about the origin of birds was watertight and unassailable. Anna accepted that, as her starting point, she probably had to take Helland’s and Tybjerg’s positions at face value in order to even begin to understand the vast network of scientific implications; later she could form her own opinion. However, she honestly couldn’t see why Helland and Tybjerg were right and Freeman, according to them, was wrong.

“Birds are present-day dinosaurs,” she wrote on a sheet of paper, followed by: “Birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs.” Then she drew two heads, which bore some resemblance to Tybjerg and Helland, on the paper and pinned it up on the wall. She took another sheet, drew another head—supposed to be Freeman’s—and wrote on it: “Birds are not present-day dinosaurs,” followed by: “Modern birds and extinct dinosaurs are sister groups and solely related to each other via their common ancestor…” Who was that again? She looked it up and added “Archosaur” to the paper and stuck it on the wall.

“‘An archosaur is a diapsid reptile,’” she mimicked her textbook, and shut her eyes irritably. Now what does diapsid mean? She looked it up. It meant that the skull had two holes in each temporal fenestra. As opposed to synapsids and anapsids which had…. She chewed her lip. What exactly was a temporal fenestra ? She looked it up. The opening at the rear of the skull for the extension and the attachment of the jaw muscles; a distinction was made between the infratemporal and the supratemporal fenestra, and what were they again? Anna looked them up.

The days passed in a blur, and she could feel her frustration escalate. She was writing a dissertation, not some trivial essay. The whole point was that she would contribute something new, not merely summarize a well-known controversy by repeating existing material. She tried to explain to Cecilie that it had taken her three days to read four pages, and Cecilie stared at her as though she had fallen from the sky. But it was true. Every word was alien, and every time she looked up one word, more terms followed and eventually she had looked up so many terms in so many books and followed so many references that she could no longer remember what she had initially struggled with. There was never a one-word explanation; every term described nature’s most intricate processes, whose terminology she had learned as an undergraduate, but she could barely remember it these days, so she was forced to look that up as well. After one month, her frustration had evolved into actual fear. Was she plain stupid? The bottom line was she grasped so little of the controversy—which clearly enraged both Tybjerg and Helland—that it was embarrassing.

In a fit of despair she started reading Freeman’s book The Birds from start to finish. Dr. Tybjerg had mentioned it several times and dryly remarked that when Anna was capable of pulling it apart, she would be ready to defend her dissertation. Anna had had the book lying on her desk for weeks. Every day when she left, she put it in her bag, intending to read it, and every night she managed seven lines before falling asleep. Time to bite the bullet now. Suddenly spurred on by the promise that everything would fall into place once she had read it, she immersed herself in the book.