The Flight of the Iguana Read Online Free PDF Page B

gliding to powered flapping, has evolved separately no less than sixteen times among the nonavian vertebrate animals—that is, in four distinct groups of flying fishes, in one frog, in two groups of extant reptiles as well as the pterosaurs, in two kinds of flying squirrels, in bats, and in three kinds of marsupials, not to mention a few other weird little kamikaze mammals that neither you nor I have ever heard of. Among those sixteen instances, all but the flying fish and maybe the pterosaurs are known to have gotten their start as tree climbers. The force of statistical probability, as well as the force of gravity, seems to favor the arborealist side.
    So what? say the cursorialists. Evolution is not roulette. Andbesides, they say, the case of feather-assisted bird flight is obviously a drastic exception to the general pattern—peregrine falcons and hummingbirds are spectacularly proficient, after all, while those poor cloddish “flying” frogs and lizards and squirrels are still careening down half out of control and slamming themselves into tree trunks. Furthermore, say the cursorialists, it is hard to imagine Archaeopteryx doing much tree climbing with those long primary feathers sticking way out past its foreleg claws. Try opening your car door while wearing an outfielder’s mitt on each hand, and you’ll appreciate the problem.
    To all of which the arborealists, of course, have ready rebuttals.
    The first of the arborealists was none other than Othniel C. Marsh, a preeminent figure in American paleontology during the nineteenth century, and one of the two principals behind the great wild dinosaur wars that were fought out between rival collectors in frontier Montana and Wyoming. (The other paleontological warlord was Edwin Drinker Cope, and it’s a bizarre story all to itself.) Concerning the evolution of flight, Marsh argued: “In the early arboreal birds, which jumped from branch to branch, even rudimentary feathers on the forelimbs would be an advantage as they would tend to lengthen a downward leap or break the force of a fall.” Arguing the other view, among the first of the cursorialists, was Franz Baron Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an elusive but unmistakably demented Hungarian who happens to be my own personal favorite in the paleontological pantheon. Baron Nopcsa was a brilliant prodigy who made significant contributions toward the study of Archaeopteryx until certain other interests pulled him aside toward Albania, motorcycle touring, and death.
    Nopcsa was born in Transylvania, always a good sign. He published his first paleontological monograph as a university freshman, and thereafter turned into an arrogant snot. Somehow he became infatuated with the geography and ethnography of Albania.He learned the dialects, amassed a huge library of books about the country, made many visits; eventually he offered himself for the position of King of Albania, based on what he considered his surpassing competence for the job, but the Hapsburg overlords picked someone else. During World War I he served the Austro-Hungarian Army as a spy along the Romanian border, letting his hair grow and dressing as a Romanian peasant. He spoke the languages. He passed. Much later, when he was bored and impoverished, his baronial lands having been confiscated in the peace settlement, he took off on a long motorcycle ramble with his male lover, an Albanian named Bajazid. Finally, in April 1933, for reasons we’ll never know, Nopcsa came to the end of his tether. He slipped Bajazid a mickey, shot him through the head, then put the pistol to himself. But before he died—in fact, it was way back in 1907—Baron Nopcsa had published a paper titled “Ideas on the Origin of Flight.” The central datum was of course Archaeopteryx.
    Nopcsa wrote: “We may quite well suppose that birds originated from bipedal long-tailed cursorial reptiles which during running oared along in the air by flapping