The Star Talks To Luis Chiappe: Linking Birds To Dinosaurs

When Luis Chiappe looks out his windows in Sag Harbor and sees seagulls swirling around the dock and honking geese heading south over the water, he sees dinosaurs. When he peers from his office window at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and sees pigeons nesting on the sills, he sees dinosaurs.

That's right: dinosaurs, not just birds. Mr. Chiappe (pronounced key-AP-pay) is a paleontologist, a man very much in the forefront of paleo-ornithology, the study of ancient birds, one of the hottest topics in the natural sciences today. In recent months and weeks, his discoveries and his work to prove that birds are the collateral descendants of the largest creatures ever to roam the earth have been featured in National Geographic magazine, on the front page of The New York Times, in numerous science and nature-related publications, and on the World Wide Web.

"An amazing amount of new information exists that is important to the understanding of the origin of birds and their evolution," said Mr. Chiappe, a research associate in the museum's departments of paleontology and ornithology. "In the last five years, we've found more species of primitive birds - and named and studied them - than in the past 150 years."

Just Small Dinosaurs

And, he, said, in confirmation of his conviction that "birds are just small, short-tailed, and feathered dinosaurs," he and his colleagues must figure out how all these species are related in order to structure new hypotheses about the origin of flight and the evolution of warm-bloodedness and feathers.

The search for the dinosaur-bird link has taken Mr. Chiappe around the world - to Mongolia and its vast Gobi Desert, China, Madagascar, Spain and other areas of Europe, around North America, and to South America.

"The oldest dinosaur we know of," he said, "is 220 million years old, while the oldest bird, Archaeopteryx, whose fossil remains were discovered in Germany, lived 150 million years ago."

He suspects, due to the emphasis on and popularity of his subject and because "funding for research tends to be more forthcoming with hot topics," that the next few years will see more breakthroughs in this area of paleontology, "that discoveries, research, and the resulting knowledge will add another 30 million years to the age of the oldest bird fossil."

Origins Of Flight

The goals of his work, Mr. Chiappe said, are the answers to numerous theories, ranging from "Are birds really dinosaurs?" to "How flight was achieved (from the ground up or from trees down?), how old feathers are, and where did feathers come from."

Of course, like all serious scientists in this arcane domain, he must rely on the fossil record for his studies, his hypotheses, and his conclusions. "Since flight did not fossilize," he pointed out, "flight becomes the most difficult issue to embrace."

His own suspicions are that it was achieved neither from the ground up, against gravity, nor from the trees down, but rather over time "from creatures which ran down slopes, jumped from rocks, and glided."

Native Of Argentina

Mr. Chiappe, at 34, is a tall, athletic, bearded man of easy manner and the precise diction - with the accent of his native Spanish - of a university professor. He was born and reared in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His childhood interest in animals led him to study paleobiology at the University of Buenos Aires, and his first field of choice was the evolution of humans.

His work to prove that birds are the collateral descendants of the largest creatures ever to roam the earth has been featured in National Geographic magazine and on the front page of The New York Times.

As that particular area of research is played out mainly in Africa, and because funding for trips there was hard to come by, he initially concentrated on fossils of the Argentine type - specifically, crocodiles.

For his Ph.D., however, he switched to birds "because few people were involved with them and because bird fossils were available in Argentina." His doctorate was concentrated on the Mesozoic birds of South America, those from the era of "the big dinosaurs," 70 to 80 million years ago.

Greatest Adventure

After a research stint with the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires, Mr. Chiappe won a fellowship at New York's Museum of Natural History. He has been conducting research there and in the field for nearly five years, currently with funding from the museum and from the Guggenheim Foundation.

It was in the field - the Gobi Desert - in 1993, that he had perhaps his most publicized find and certainly his greatest adventure.

On a joint expedition sponsored by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and his own workplace - to Ukhaa Tolgod, a valley in southern Mongolia - Mr. Chiappe badly burned his foot with boiling water at the campsite, so severely that he could not join his team on its hikes and searches for dinosaur bones.

"There was talk of evacuating me," he said, remembering how, because the group had no antibiotics, because the nearest "town" was a four-day drive away, he nursed the ensuing infection "with peroxide, unable to walk for three weeks, expecting to lose my foot."

Intact Oviraptor

Since he could not hike far enough to join the major dig, when he could walk again he helped to excavate a dune close to the camp. The result was the discovery of a very well-preserved, by sandstorms, Oviraptor nesting on "about 23 eggs, much as a pigeon does today."

Oviraptor (meaning "egg thief") was a small, toothless, carnivorous dinosaur of the Cretaceous period (144 through 66 million years ago), in appearance a bit like a modern ostrich. The fact that it was unearthed intact, its arms protecting its unhatched eggs, gave credence to the theory of birdlike characteristics of some dinosaurs and further proof to the dinosaur-bird link.

Mr. Chiappe recovered from his injured foot, but he reflected that "there are few places left that are so wild, and it was interesting to glimpse what life must have been like before antibiotics!" The Oviraptor fossils are on loan from Mongolia to the Museum of Natural History and are still being studied.

Most Important Work

While he describes all his, and others', research and findings - no matter how small, however time-consuming - as "significant to the cause of learning more about where birds came from so we can learn where they are going," he considers his most important work to be with Mononykus, a turkey-sized ancient bird with two powerful claws in place of wings.

He described Mononykus, which lived some 75 million years ago, as a "primitive, bizarre, dinosauran creature whose importance lies in its placement in the lineage of bird evolution."

It is closer to modern birds, he said, than Archaeopteryx, but probably not a direct ancestor of today's avians. Its claws rule out the direct link, but "certainly," he said, "it is an intermediary which has a lot to do with the origins of birds because it had crossed the line from dinosaurs."

Off To Patagonia

Asked why he thought dinosaurs might have evolved into things that fly, Mr. Chiappe said that evolution is an "open door that goes in many directions." Flying, he reminded, is "a way of locomotion, of fleeing predators, of crossing oceans and deserts. You can move pretty fast if you fly!"

He is not surprised that evolution has shaped flight in a number of different groups of animals, and he pointed to insects, of which millions of species are known today, and to bats, which make up some 800 of the 4,000 to 5,000 species of known mammals. And he said there are about 10,000 species of birds, or about 25 percent of all vertebrates, "more than anything that is not fish, so they should be of interest."

Mr. Chiappe moves pretty fast, too, even without wings of his own. This week, having spent a "week writing and relaxing" in his Sag Harbor house, he leaves for a month in Argentina - a field trip of sorts, to Patagonia.

Writing A Book

Earlier this year, he boarded the Trans Siberian Express for a 6,000-mile railway journey from Beijing to Moscow on which he lectured passengers about, naturally, birds. A down-to-earth birdman, he frequently writes for such magazines as Natural History, Nature, and Science. And he currently is writing a technical book about the evolution of birds. And planning another trip to the Gobi.

"I'm a little bit all spread out," Mr. Chiappe said with a laugh, "as the relationship between dinosaurs and birds comes from everywhere. But in my work," he said, quoting Emily Dickinson, "hope is the thing with feathers."