Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

Monique stood. “You ever heard of Fritz Bedecker, Jason?”

“That German ichthyologist with all the crazy theories?”

“We think one of them might not have been so crazy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you know he had a theory about underwater air geysers in the depths?”

Jason paused. “No, I didn’t.”

Monique explained. Bedecker, a German ichthyologist and oceanographer—as well as a raging alcoholic—had come out with a series of controversial theories during his heyday in 1899. The most inflammatory of these was that prehistoric amphibians had evolved lungs not as a result of spending increasing amounts of time on land but rather in the depths of the ocean. The deep sea, Bedecker had argued, was composed of a worldwide network of what he called “underwater air geysers.” It was these air geysers, not the land, that had led to the evolution of the amphibian’s lung. It was only after the lung had fully evolved in the water that the very first amphibian crawled onto the land.

In 1899 the notion of deep sea air geysers was considered utterly ridiculous. But late in the twentieth century, that perception changed dramatically with the famous 1977 discovery in the Galápagos islands of a sea vent emitting pure hydrogen-sulfide gas. While hydrogen-sulfide geysers were very different from air geysers, the realization that gas vents of any kind were present in the depths was shocking, and caused many geologists to wonder aloud if somehow air geysers might, in fact, exist as well. To date, an actual deep-sea air geyser still hadn’t been discovered, but in 1992, the theory achieved global credibility when world-renowned Harvard geologist Milton Thornberg said that air geysers not only could exist in the depths, but also that they had to.

Thornberg’s reasoning could not have been more simple. It is a known fact that 49 percent of the earth’s crust is made of solidified oxygen. With a nine-thousand-degree molten core beneath it, it is perfectly reasonable that the solid oxygen could be superheated, turned into liquid, then gas, and be emitted straight into the depths of the ocean, much like an underwater volcano. Thornberg further explained that the reason these underwater air geysers have never been discovered is that they move around. Created by a volatile molten core that is constantly bubbling and changing, they are never in the same place for more than weeks at a time. And since they are also several miles below the surface, in blackened waters with crushing pressures, they are literally impossible to locate. But air geysers are absolutely real, Thornberg assured the world. And if so, Bedecker was right. The lungfish had evolved naturally as a result—and so could other species.

Jason turned. “Where exactly did you find this animal?”

“Just north of Point Reyes.” Craig approached the cage. “One hundred and fifty feet from the waterline.”

“ One hundred and fifty feet? So… it washed up on the beach?”

“We don’t think so. We checked. The tide hasn’t come that far up in six months.”

“Then… it crawled?”

Lisa shook her head. “No. We studied the sand, Jason, we studied it very closely for almost an hour. There were no marks of any kind.”

Jason glanced at Phil, rapidly typing this into his laptop, then turned back to Lisa and Craig. “What are you saying? How did it get there?”

It was then that he noticed a dozen thick textbooks on the counter near Phil. The one on top was titled The New Physics of Animal Flight.

Craig looked him in the eye. “We think it flew.”

JASON WAS silent. Craig Summers was serious. They were all looking at him, and they were all serious. Phil was still frantically typing, the tapping keys the only sound in the lab.

“How could it possibly have flown onto a beach, Craig? This animal must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. The existing theories of aerodyn—”

“The existing theories of aerodynamics don’t apply here, Jason.”

A glance at the textbooks. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there have been some dramatic new findings about animal flight in the past five years.” Craig had minored in fluid dynamics at UCSD and was very familiar with the physicists behind these analyses, highly regarded names like Michael Fink, Gloria Rimmelstob, Karl Heinz VonKroyter, and Phillip Goldfarb. They were all brilliant, aggressive scientists who were constantly pushing the limitations of accepted theories and regarded as the Einsteins of their time.

“What did they find exactly?”

“Are you familiar with all those flying animals that every aerodynamic theory said couldn’t even get into the air?”

“You mean bumblebees and all that?” According to established theories of aerodynamics, bumblebees, as well as several species of hummingbird and turkey, could not fly.

“No. Not bumblebees, not modern animal flight. We’re talking about prehistoric animal flight, Jason. Have you heard of Quetzateryx?”

“No.”

“It’s some dinosaur whose fossils turned up at the very top of a mountain range in Colorado in 1981. There’s unambiguous proof it flew there. For years the experts couldn’t figure out how, but they were only working with conventional aerodynamic theory.”

“Are you talking about that tiny flying dinosaur that evolved into a bird?”

“No, that’s Archaeopteryx. That weighed just a pound or two. This is Quetzateryx. It weighed six thousand pounds.”

“Six thousand ? And it flew?”

Summers nodded. “A true flying reptile.” It was a distant cousin of the much better known Quetzalcoatlus, first discovered in Texas in the 1970s.

“But how could it have—”

“Because it flew by an entirely different set of principles than any other animal we’ve ever known. This thing was nothing like modern birds, Jason. Different bones, musculature, wing structure—different everything. Have you heard of Gloria Rimmelstob? She’s a fluid-dynamics superstar out of Hamburg University.” Craig pointed to the pile of texts. “Three of her entire books are dedicated to something called ‘the new energy-to-lift ratios of muscles.’”

Jason glanced at the texts. “They explain how this Quetza…”

“Quetzateryx.”

“… how Quetzateryx flew?”

“In more detail than I could come close to understanding, but yes. Muscle strength is a big part of it.”

“Muscle strength.”

“Correct. For years, just one major theory explained animal flight, and it only covered physically light animals like birds that fly by manipulating their feathers. But these scientists collectively constructed a second theory for much heavier animals that didn’t have feathers and flew by manipulating specialized flying muscles.”

“What are those exactly?”

“They’re called ‘rippling muscles’ and they’re on the top and bottom of an animal’s wings. They say if they’re manipulated in just the right way, they can create lift with an efficiency nobody previously thought possible.”

“How do these… rippling muscles work?”

“According to Rimmelstob—and I guess VonKroyter and Fink did research on this too—in a way not covered by Bernoulli’s theorem.”

“Which is…”

“Lift is created when a fixed wing, any wing—a plane’s, bird’s, whatever—passes through the air. Wings are shaped with a curved top but a flat bottom. So when air passes around them, the air that goes over the top has to move faster than the air that passes under the bottom so both airstreams reach the other side at the same time. The increase in air velocity on the top creates a decrease in pressure, which creates lift, which in turn makes the wing rise. That’s how most things fly. Fair enough?”