They Had Feathers, Damnit!

…was what I wanted to call my last article for Cornell’s Living Bird

A new team at the magazine, all under forty as all such people are, had decided that they could eliminate some of the magazine’s perpetual debt by firing all the nature writers. Nature writers do not make enough to relieve any excess debt. That nature writing was the original reason that such magazines existed was not even on their radar screens

“People want APPS, not nature writing!”, one said to me. Words fail. i knew LB was no longer my home.

But before I left I decided I was in a good place to take a whack at something that has bothered me for years. Why do otherwise intelligent people insist on seeing dinosaurs as reptiles, when anyone who knows anything knows that a T rex is closer to a chicken than, say, an iguana.

A particular annoy annoyance to dino buffs were the lizardy “Velociraptors ‘”(actually they were about twice the size of that coyote- sized creature) with their slithery tails and scaly skin . Raptors are in the group of dinos that most resembles modern birds, and were certainly feathered.; if Archaopteryx is a bird, then a raptor is.

Some of us had hoped that the second Jurassic Park would rectify these errors, especially those raptors. But get real; you do not make billions by messing with a gold mine.

Who was the first person to depict dinosaurs as feathered? Certainly John Ostrom at Yale and the mad cowboy Robert Bakker out in the Rockies laid the foundation. But my vote is for John McLoughlin, artist, paleontologist and utterly independent scholar, who is affiliated with no institution and lives in a half restored stable ca 1750 in Talpa, NM, who introduced the theme in this early novel The Helix and The The Sword, which takes place in the asteroid belt. The evil emperor Lothar IV, the villain of the story has (1981) the “sisters” of the Genetic Society “build” him two Deinonychids, eagle-like raptors, which he )ses to tyrannize and kill his subjects. here is his scene:

“As a young man, of course, Lothar IV had been required to read the Annals of the Hand of Man. In the Seconds Codex of the Annals, he once read a quote: “Washington and Moscow are come to blows at last, and with them all of Earth must die; by fire, by knives and by venom airborne are we doomed, for the talons of these beasts are steel, and their breath Death itself.”

“Whatever manner of animals — or weapons — Washington and Moscow might have been, the then Rising Regent had found this reference to them oddly appealing. When, on the death of his father, Lothar became Regent, he desired to adopt some new trappings to fit his position. Having the Semerling flair for the unusual, the new Pantocrator of the Path of Jove decided that a pair of matched synes-companions, named — of course — Washington and Moscow, would be to his liking.

“Applying to the Sisterhood of the Nucleotides, he expressed his desire thus: his companions must understand (though not speak) the speech of men. They must answer to the Okumura link of the First Security Maniple. They must be lethally armed and defend the person of their Regent with their lives, if necessary; and, even in repose, they must be of an aspect which alone would strike fear into the hearts of men.

“And so, according to their ancient custom, the Sisters grew Washington and Moscow, exacting in exchange two megatons of carbon, two megaliters of oxygen, and certain promises. Delving into their records, the Sisters found the tale of the Dinosauria, a lost race of birdlike beings that inhabited dread Earth long before the advent of human beings. They learned of the Deinonychid, a beast that walked on two legs like a bird but that possessed, in place of wings, terrible three-fingered taloned hands. The Deinonychid, it was said, could traverse seventy kilometers in a single hour on its long legs, each of which sported two running-toes and a scythelike inner talon with which the monster kicked its prey to death.

“The Deinonychid and its fearsome kind inhabited the Earth in a time when all mammals were but shrewlike midgets, insect eaters. Within the inmost recesses of the mammalian mind, therefore, survives an ancient racial memory, a black fear of the bird-beast dinosauria. Knowing this, the Sisterhood grew for Lothar IV two twin Deinonychids, or copies of their supposed form (none of their nucleotide sequences, after all, having survived the demise of the Dinosauria some sixty-five million years ago).

“Man-high, smooth-coated in short blackly iridescent feathers, red of eye and each wearing a diamond-studded Regency orange collar, Washington and Moscow were delivered to Lothar IV by theSisterhood. Thenceforth, they accompanied Lothar IV everywhere he went, standing outside his chambers when he slept, beside him as he ate. They became his trademarks, and his joys, and the agents of his Regental wrath as well.”

Here is John , writer of many books of fiction and nonfiction, the sage and hermit of Talpa, where it is rumored that not only is he the only Anglo to join in las Posadas; he is without a doubt he only atheist! .