The Dinosaur Feather (4 page)

Anna’s external supervisor was Dr. Tybjerg. He was a vertebrate morphologist who specialized in the evolution of cynodont birds. He was Professor Helland’s polar opposite. He had brown, thinning hair, dark eyes, a small nimble body, and he wore pebble glasses at work that made Anna smile because he looked like a parody of himself. Dr. Tybjerg was shy and very earnest. He never canceled their meetings, and he always arrived well prepared, bringing with him any books he had mentioned at their previous meeting or a photocopy of an article he had promised her. His speech was staccato. He added impressive amounts of sugar to his strong black tea. To begin with he had found it hard to look her in the eye and had clammed up like an oyster on the few occasions Anna had asked him personal questions.

Dr. Tybjerg was the first person to take Anna to the Vertebrate Collection.

“You can’t learn about bones from books,” he said, as they walked down the corridor to the collection. “And you must never,” he added, giving Anna a stern look, “draw any conclusions about bones from drawings or photographs—never!”

Dr. Tybjerg unlocked the door and disappeared down aisles of cupboards. Anna stopped, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar smell of preserved animals, before venturing further inside. It was neither dark nor light. It was like a drug-addict-proof bathroom: you could see enough to find the toilet paper, but not a vein in your arm.

The Vertebrate Collection consisted of a large room divided by display cases with glass doors behind which stuffed animals were exhibited and cabinets with drawers containing boxes and cases in varying sizes, in which the boiled and cleaned bones were stored. Dr. Tybjerg marched down the aisles with familiar ease and stopped halfway.

“This is where the birds are kept,” he said, cheerfully.

The air-conditioning was making a strange noise, and there was an awful smell. Anna peered into the cabinets with their rows of birds, neatly lined up. Ostriches, a dodo skull, and tiny sparrows of every kind. Dr. Tybjerg moved down an aisle to the left and disappeared around the corner.

“This is a sacred place,” he said from somewhere in the twilight, and Anna could hear him rattling doors. She walked close to one of the display cabinets, pressed her nose against the glass, and tried to make out in the gloom what kind of bird was on the other side. It was large and brown, with a plump tail feather. Its wings had been spread out, as if the bird had been about to take off or land when it died, and Anna spotted a stuffed mouse that had been placed in its beak for illustration. Its wing span was six feet, at least, and the bird made all the others in the cabinet look like a flock of frightened chickens.

“A golden eagle,” Dr. Tybjerg said. Anna nearly jumped out of her skin. He had gone around the cupboards and come up behind her without her noticing. He held two long wooden boxes under his arm. She reached out her hand to support herself against a cabinet.

“Don’t touch the glass in the door,” he warned. “It’s genuine crystal. You’ll break it.”

“Does it have to be so dark in here?” Anna asked.

“Come on,” he said, ignoring her question. Anna followed him. Back in the corridor she realized her legs were shaking.

“Now, let’s take a look at this,” Dr. Tybjerg said, as he settled down at a table by a window. “This is a
Rhea Americana
.” Carefully, he lifted a bird skull out of the box.

“It’s a secondarily flightless bird and so has a skeleton that is quite like that of predatory dinosaurs, in that it has an unkeeled sternum. This makes it a good skeleton to practice on,” he explained, “because when it comes to flying birds, everything is welded together. The bones of secondarily flightless birds, however, are somewhat reminiscent of those of primitive birds. Now, let’s go through it together.”

Anna made herself comfortable and watched Dr. Tybjerg take out the bones from the box and spread them out on the table. A build-your-own-bird kit. He started pairing them up and Anna watched, fascinated. She had no idea where anything went, but she liked the gentle movements of his hands.

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.

Freeman’s book was a masterpiece. It was filled with wonderful color photographs and illustrations, and throughout the text he argued seriously and soberly. He backed up his views with well-argued scientific conclusions, made references to existing literature, and allowed for doubt to remain where certain points had yet to be decided. Had it not been for Helland, and especially Tybjerg’s ardent assertion that Freeman was wrong, Anna would have bought Freeman’s sister-group theory on the spot. Freeman was without a doubt someone who knew what he was talking about, and this was the man she was supposed to “wipe the floor” with? When she had finished reading
The Birds
she had eighty-two pages of handwritten notes and hadn’t grown even a bit wiser; rather, she had become truly terrified of the task that lay ahead of her. With
The Birds
in her arms and her heart pounding, she decided to come clean with Dr. Tybjerg.

Dr. Tybjerg was waiting for her in the cafeteria at the Natural History Museum, and Anna didn’t even have time to sit down in the chair opposite him before her misgivings poured out of her.

“Dr. Tybjerg, I fail to see why Professor Freeman’s scientific position is wrong . . . I think his argument sounds convincing.”

Dr. Tybjerg pursed his lips.

“Well, then you haven’t read enough,” he said with zen-like calm.

“It’s taken me three weeks to read
The Birds
,” Anna groaned.

“Why on earth did you read all of it? You can flip through it. That’s more than enough for anyone.” Dr. Tybjerg took the book from her.

“This book is a flash in the pan, nothing more.” He quickly thumbed the pages. Then he smiled. “But I do understand why it can seem a little overwhelming. Freeman appears convincing because he has convinced himself. Such people are always the worst.” Dr. Tybjerg paused and then looked as if he had come up with a plan.

“Drop the book,” he ordered her. “Instead, read at least fifteen papers written by people who argue that birds are present-day dinosaurs, and fifteen papers by people who disagree. This will make everything clear to you. And stay away from books for the time being. Many of them are good and you can return to them later, but this one,” Dr. Tybjerg slammed
The Birds
on the table, “is nothing but whorey propaganda.”