The Flight of the Iguana Read Online Free PDF Page A

notebooks. “Hope is not ‘the thing with feathers.’ The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.” It can get highly confusing, as you see, and even more so when you consider that an international group of distinguished paleontologists convened during the summer of 1984 in the small town of Eichstätt, Bavaria, to haggle among themselves on the very same issue. What is the thing with feathers?
    Those scientists, divided raucously on particulars, did have one point of consensus. They were all concerned with a creature called Archaeopteryx.
    Archaeopteryx is simply the oldest thing with feathers that mankind has ever unearthed. It was an animal. It is known from just six fossil specimens. It lived about 160 million years ago, in the heyday of the dinosaurs. It was first discovered in the early years of the Darwinian revolution and played a crucial role in giving impetus to that revolution, yet it remains today one of the pivotal unsolved riddles of paleontology. It had a long bony tail, it had teeth, it had the skeletal anatomy of a small dinosaur—and it had feathers, exactly like those of a modern bird.
    This much is indisputable, literally written in stone. Say anything more about Archaeopteryx, and you have taken a controversial position.
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    There is no question today, among paleontologists, that birds evolved originally from a line of reptilian ancestors. Skeletal anatomy alone is enough to show a close kinship between modern birds and certain primitive reptiles. But the intermediate stages in that transmogrification are rather more of a mystery. No one knew what sort of creature might have been the missing link between reptile and bird—until the discovery of Archaeopteryx.
    The first Archaeopteryx specimen ever recognized was just the impression of a single feather, preserved with startling precision in a piece of limestone. It turned up in 1861 at a rock quarry near the Bavarian village of Solnhofen, not far from Eichstätt, and announced itself to the world like the portentous opening chord of an overture to a wild opera. It had defied the odds, that feather, captured with photographic fidelity in the same fine-grain limestone that made Solnhofen rock highly valued for lithographic printing. It was the size and shape of a primary feather from the wing of a pigeon, and one German scientist wrote of it blandly as evidence of a fossil bird. Then almost immediately there came a related find from the same area of Solnhofen limestone. This one was a full skeleton, thoroughly fledged with thesame sort of feathers; the anatomy otherwise, though, seemed purely dinosaurian. It was dubbed Archaeopteryx, a reasonably safe formulation meaning “ancient wing.”
    The Origin of Species had been published just two years before, and the notion of a transitional form between reptiles and birds (between any two groups of creatures) was as provocative as any idea in European science. To the anti-Darwinists (mainly churchmen and conservative scientists) Archaeopteryx had to be either a bird, period, or a reptile, period, or else it was some sort of sick-minded hoax. To the Darwinists it was precisely the sort of missing-link evidence that could give dramatic support to their theory. What is the thing with feathers? The disputation began.
    In 1877 a second complete Archaeopteryx was uncovered, again from the Solnhofen quarries. Evidently the animal had been fairly abundant in this area during the late Jurassic period, when those fine-grain limestone strata were being laid down. This second full specimen—preserved in a natural pose, showing excellent detail on both bones and feathers—was recognized as a rare scientific treasure and snatched up for a museum in Berlin. One expert has said of it: “The Berlin Archaeopteryx may well be the most important natural history specimen in existence, perhaps