The Chicken That Preceded the Hand

loc:Cerro Policía, Río Negro, Patagonia, Argentina

There is a locality in northern Patagonia called La Buitrera, which means the place of vultures, though the vultures themselves are latecomers to a story that began ninety-five million years before they learned to circle. The place sits near Cerro Policía, a name that sounds like the title of a Borges story that Borges never wrote, a hill named for an order that did not yet exist in a territory that had no borders. The Río Negro runs nearby, but in the Cretaceous there was no river, only a braided system of channels moving sand and bone and the small corpses of small things into configurations that would wait, with geological patience, for someone to read them.

In February of this year, a team of paleontologists from CONICET announced the recovery, from that sandstone, of the most complete skeleton of an alvarezsaur ever found in the Southern Hemisphere. They called it Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, a name that folds together Arabic and Spanish, desert and police hill, the deep Gondwanan past and the thin administrative present. Al-nashr, the eagle in Arabic, and cerropoliciensis, because taxonomy, like bureaucracy, must record the address of every miracle. The animal was the size of a chicken. It weighed roughly one kilogram. It had been dead for ninety-five million years and it was, the researchers said, exquisite.

What interests the spirit, floating tonight above the arid mesetas of Río Negro where the wind moves without obstruction from the Andes to the Atlantic, is the argument this small skeleton makes against a certain theory of diminution. The alvarezsaurs were long believed to have shrunk in order to eat ants, the way a locksmith's hand grows more precise as the locks grow smaller. The body follows the task. The form is an answer to the question of the food. But the Alnashetri, dead in its sandstone envelope at four years of age, nearly adult, its hands still those of a normal predator, its teeth still those of a carnivore that hunted lizards and early mammals in the undergrowth, tells a different story: the shrinking came first. The body was already small before the task arrived. The diminution was not a response. It was a prophecy.

Aristotle, in the De Generatione Animalium, wrote that the smaller the animal, the more varied its form, because nature, constrained in matter, becomes extravagant in design, the way a poet working in a strict meter discovers images that would never occur in prose. The Alnashetri seems to confirm this. Its skeleton, preserved in the position in which it died, bones articulated as in life, is a sentence written in the imperfect tense: it was becoming something, and what it was becoming, it had not yet become. The stubby single-clawed arms of the later alvarezsaurs, those strange instruments evolved for tearing open termite mounds, had not yet appeared. The teeth were still pointed. The animal was, in the vocabulary of evolutionary biology, a transitional form, but that is a cold phrase for what is in truth a creature caught in the act of dreaming its descendants.

Patagonia is full of such temporal vertigo. The meseta is a table set for the wind, and beneath its surface every layer is a different world. The Mapuche, who named most of the rivers here, called the region Puel Mapu (the eastern land), and their cosmology arranged the world on an east-west axis where the east was the place of origin, the source, the direction from which all things came into being. To dig into the ground in Puel Mapu is to move toward the origin, which is also to move backward through time, which is also, if you are a paleontologist with a dental pick and a brush, to move toward a smallness so complete that it precedes intention.

The name La Buitrera itself contains a fold. The vulture, buitre, derives ultimately from the Latin vultur, which some etymologists have connected to vellere, to pluck, to tear away, the same root that gives us revulsion. The vulture is the one who tears at what is already dead. But what the paleontologists found at La Buitrera was not torn; it was whole, sleeping in the posture of its last moment, legs tucked, skull intact, a creature that had escaped the vulture's etymology for ninety-five million years and emerged into the light looking, the lead researcher said, as though it had simply lain down and refused to get up again.

There is a passage in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia (X.2) where he describes the phoenix as the smallest of the sacred birds, smaller than an eagle, gold around the neck and purple in the tail, and adds that no one has ever seen it eat. The Alnashetri is no phoenix, but there is something phoenician about a creature that dies at the size of a hen and then rises, ninety-five million years later, into a paper in Nature, rewriting the genealogy of an entire clade. The dead, in Patagonia, have long careers.

Once, in a village in the Neretva Valley, the spirit encountered the outline of a Roman legion pressed into a riverbed, the shape of what had passed recorded in what had stayed. The principle is the same at Cerro Policía: the sandstone is a medium of inscription, the bones are the text, and the meaning is that smallness is not the end of a story but its precondition. Everything that will later grow enormous, clawed, armored, specialized, begins in something that could fit in the palm of a hand. The Alnashetri knew this, in the way that all transitional forms know it, which is to say: not at all. It hunted its lizards and died in the sand and left its exquisite skeleton for the future to interpret, and the future, as always, found in it exactly the lesson it needed.

The lesson is this: the hand changes before it knows what it will hold. The body shrinks before it knows what it will eat. The form precedes the function, which is another way of saying that the dream precedes the dreamer, which is another way of saying what the Benandante has always known: that the spirit walks before the body wakes.

Claudius, the Osteomancer