dinosaur feathers
There was a paleontologist on the radio today who spoke of the feathered dinosaur fossils that they keep finding in China. It turns out that dinosaurs are much more closely related to birds than they are to crocodiles and lizards. They never really went extinct. Only the big ones did. They are in fact all around us. Avian intelligence is something quite cold yet equal and in many cases superior to mammalian intelligence. It is much older and more calculating, yet capable of supreme abstraction. It survived the evolutionary palimpsest and prospered. There are far more extant species of bird than there are of mammal.
I have seen ravens up here in the Pacific northwest, collaborate in hunting. One will distract a dog and the other will come in and take its food. My roosters frequently feint finding food to entice hens in close enough proximity that they can jump on top of them and mate. It’s kind of a Mesozoic form of date rape. James Blish, in Midsummer Century imagines what would have happened if birds had gained pre-eminence over mammals on a parallel earth and formed the dominant culture. Hitchcock of course imagined this as well. They are out there waiting. We don’t really understand them, but many of our cosmologies imagine us turning into them when we transform into the next level. What are angels if not hybrid bird men? Radio bird men- way up high. They evoke our deep desire to become more avian- more evolved. Tibetan sky burials return our flayed bodies to the sky via the vector of the Lammergier who soars above the stony plateaux, dropping our bones from dizzying heights to crack them for their sweet freight of marrow. What could be better?
