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their free anterior extremities. By gradually increasing in size, the enlarged but perhaps horny hypothetical scales [would] . . . ultimately develop to actual feathers; this epidermic cover would also raise the temperature of the body, and thus help to increase the mental and bodily activities of these rapacious forms.”
    Nopcsa was just deranged enough (well, maybe more than enough) to be a bold, original thinker. In suggesting an earth-bound Archaeopteryx that flapped its feathered arms to help itself gain speed as it ran, he had broken through a basic assumption in the debate over whether feathers evolved first for insulation or for gliding—the assumption that, if those earliest feathers served any aerodynamic purpose, the purpose must have been flight. But ground travel too involves aerodynamics. Ask any designer of racing cars; ask anyone who rides touring motorcycles.
    For three quarters of a century Nopcsa’s view was dismissed as nonsensical. Ground-travel aerodynamics seemed an unlikely precursor to feathered flight since, as soon as the animal made that next little evolutionary leap, becoming airborne, it would have lost all the running leverage from its legs; losing that leverage, it would have achieved a net decrease instead of a net increase in speed, and therefore also a net decrease in its prospects of survival. The gap between feather-assisted running and feather-assisted flying seemed evolutionarily unbridgeable. But now again the notion of ground-travel aerodynamics is being given some careful thought.
    One of the hot new ideas on the subject, as of the 1984 conference in Eichstätt, is that maybe Archaeopteryx used its arm feathers as rudders, for changing direction erratically as it ran along. Assisted by aerodynamic rudders, this little beast might have streaked out a wild zigzag path across the floor of Cretaceous forests, escaping from bigger and faster predators.
    The cursorialists at Eichstätt were intrigued. The arborealists were not swayed. The disputation goes on.
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    What is the thing with feathers? It might be a dinosaur dressed for warmth in a chicken suit. It might be the earliest bird, hot-blooded and flapping its way from tree to tree. It might be your nephew or mine or Woody Allen’s, in need of a visit to Zurich. It is a mystifying cross between fowl and reptile, a chimera sculpted in fossil stone—an oxymoronic creature that actually lived and died, rather like Baron Nopcsa himself.
    It perches on the soul, this thing, singing a tune without words.
    We call it Archaeopteryx. The name is Latin, standing for: Thank God there are some riddles we can’t solve.

NASTY HABITS

    An African Bedbug Buggers the Proof-by-Design
    A fellow named Duane T. Gish was in town here last week, playing his practiced role in a debate on the subject of “scientific creationism” versus evolutionary theory. I didn’t go. It was dollar night at the movies. But now I regret having missed a precious opportunity, since just the next day, in my random reading, I came upon an account of the startling deportment of the hemipteran insect Xylocaris maculipennis, an animal that demands pondering by creationists and evolutionists alike. A question-and-answer period followed the debate, but with me off watching Peggy Sue Got Married and pushing popcorn into my face, the important Xylocaris maculipennis question never got asked of perhaps the one human being most qualified to attempt an answer. Namely, Duane T. Gish.
    Duane T. Gish, as it turns out, is a famous (some would say, notorious) man, vice president and leading spokesman of the Institute for Creation Research, which is a fundamentalist think tank based in Santee, California. He travels across America arguing the creationist viewpoint—that the Earth is only 10,000 years old, that evolution is an atheistic delusion, that the myriad types of plants and animals which some