The Dinosaur Feather

– and on it she wrote: ‘Birds are not presentday 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 was it ‘diapsid’ meant? 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 summarise 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 those 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 drily remarked that when Anna was capable of pulling it apart, she would be ready for her viva. 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 colour 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 a tad 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 make a clean breast of it to Dr Tybjerg.
    Dr Tybjerg was waiting for her in the refectory 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 Zenlike calm.
    ‘It’s taken me three weeks to read
The Birds
,’ Anna groaned.
    ‘Why on earth did you read all of it? You can flick 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