The Dinosaur Feather(10)

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.”