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complaints.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He can’t teach,’ Johannes declared.
    ‘That’s weird,’ she said. ‘I’ve just spent all afternoon with him and I thought he explained things really well.’
    ‘Not to a classroom full of students. He gets nervous and he drones on as if he were reading aloud from some long, convoluted text he knows by heart. I think he’s a bit doolally, I mean, seriously. They only keep him on because he knows everything there is to know about the Vertebrate Collection. More than anyone in the whole world. It’s like hiring someone with autism to look after a vast record collection. He knows where everything is and what it’s called. But they would never offer him tenure. To be employed by the University of Copenhagen, you have to be able to teach.’ He paused before he added: ‘Dr Tybjerg is weirder than most.’
    Anna rested her head on her keyboard.
    ‘Lucky me, or what?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘One of my supervisors is useless and the other one is a weirdo.’
    ‘Don’t start all that again,’ Johannes said. ‘We’ve already been there. Helland’s all right.’
    ‘I’m just saying.’
    ‘Yes, and I would rather you didn’t.’

     
    To begin with, every word and every scientific argument in the controversy about the origin of birds were watertight and unassailable. Anna accepted that, as her starting point, she probably had to take Helland’s and Tybjerg’s positions at face value in order to even begin to understand the vast network of scientific implications; later she could form her own opinion. However, she honestly couldn’t see why Helland and Tybjerg were right, and Freeman, according to them, was wrong.
    ‘Birds are present-day dinosaurs,’ she wrote on a sheet of paper, followed by: ‘Birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs.’ Then she drew two heads, which bore some resemblance to Tybjerg and Helland, on the paper and pinned it up on the wall. She took another sheet, drew another head – supposed to be Freeman’s – 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