The Dinosaur Feather

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 tarted-up propaganda.’
    Anna exhaled through her nostrils.
    ‘And one final thing,’ he added, giving her a short, sharp look. ‘You need to assume that I’m right. You’ll be convinced in time, but until that happens you need to accept my position. Otherwise you’ll quite simply lose your way.’
    Dr Tybjerg’s face told her the meeting was over. Anna nodded.
    Anna spent the next three days searching the database for published papers at the University Library for Natural Science and Health Studies in Nørre Allé. She kept reminding herself that Tybjerg was right.
    The first day was an exercise in futility. There were tonnes of papers for and against, but she didn’t come across anything which convinced her that Helland and Tybjerg’s argument was more valid than Freeman’s. It wasn’t until day two that thingsimproved. She had compiled over forty papers at that point, she had photocopied them and spread them out on the table in front of her, and she was just about to give into frustration again when a tiny flicker of light appeared in the darkness.
    If
Tybjerg was right,
if
it really was the case that the kinship of birds to dinosaurs was as well-supported as Tybjerg and Helland and . . . she did a quick count . . . around twenty-five other vertebratists from all over the world agreed it was, then it had to follow that their scientific position was the stronger, at least for now, as Dr Tybjerg maintained, and if that were true, well, then it was indeed remarkable that reputable journals such as
Nature, Science
and, in particular,
Science Today
, which owed their existence to their scientific credibility, continued to waste column inches on it. Anna still remained to be convinced that this was the case, but that seemed secondary now. The situation would have been different if a sliver of doubt remained.
If
birds might have been dinosaurs,
if
fossilised evidence had yet to be discovered, which Anna could see had been the case in the 1970s and 1980s,
if
the feathered
Sinosauropteryx
hadn’t been found in 2000 or the feathered
Tyrannosaurus
in 2005. But there was plenty of fossil evidence. The feathered dinosaur was a reality, and it was clear in every single paper which argued in favour of the close kinship between birds and dinosaurs that the authors were convinced that birds were dinosaurs.
Utterly
convinced.
    Anna stared into space.
    Dr Tybjerg had told her that the editorial committee of a scientific journal typically consisted of five people with a science background, which broadly speaking meant that fifteen people from the three leading journals,
Nature, Science
and
Science Today
, were in supreme command of which scientific topics would reach the public. Fifteen people. That’s not many, Anna thought, and in order to avoid giving preferential treatment to certain subjects or areas of research, those fifteen people had to consider very carefully if what they published did, in fact, reflect the actual work being carried out across the world. And this was where things didn’t add up. Even though experts agreed that birds were present-day dinosaurs, Anna found in every other journal, at least, new contributions to the debate. She could feel the excitement pump through her body. Quick as lightning she sorted the papers into two piles, then she highlighted the names of the authors in yellow, and when that was done, she leaned back and smiled. There were twenty-four full-length papers and minor contributions in the pile which supported the kinship of birds to dinosaurs; there were twenty-three contributions in the pile which didn’t believe that birds were present-day dinosaurs. Together, Dr Tybjerg and Professor Helland accounted for five of the articles in the one pile; the remaining nineteen had been written by sixteen other vertebratists from universities all over the world. It was a rather convincing spread.
    Then she went through the pile with twenty-three papers. These were written by three different authors. Clive Freeman, Michael Kramer and Xian Chien Lu. Clive