If you believe what you read in the papers, Sankar Chatterjee ought to be the crown prince of paleontology. Six years ago he announced that he had found the world’s oldest bird fossil. It beat the previous record not by a mere 1 or 2 million years but by 75 million. With one quick kick, it seemed, Chatterjee sent paleontologists who thought they knew something about how birds had evolved tumbling in the dust.
Discovering the oldest fossil of anything is obviously wonderful for a paleontologist’s career. The fossil instantly becomes the centerpiece of any future theory about how an animal evolved and what it evolved from. And not incidentally, the fossil finder becomes just as important. In 1974, for example, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson found Lucy, the oldest, most complete fossil of an upright human ancestor. The discovery gave him so much clout that he could later found and head his own research organization, the Institute of Human Origins, in Berkeley.
Chatterjee, however, is not the head of any institute of avian origins. He still lives in Lubbock, and he still teaches at Texas Tech University, where he’s been for 12 years. Instead of reaping the benefits of a major discovery, he’s at the center of a storm of controversy. A number of critics consider his bones to be a hopeless mess of fragments that doesn’t even come close to supporting his claim to the oldest bird. These critics also attack Chatterjee’s professional conduct; only in the past year has he begun to publish his results, and only in piecemeal form, at that. Considering all the attention he garnered in 1986, it perplexes people that Chatterjee took so long. His more vocal critics say his work is misleading and incapable of supporting his headlines. In a few years, claims Tim Rowe of the University of Texas, this thing will be pointed at and laughed at.
The soft-spoken, congenial 48-year-old object of these attacks professes to be mystified by all the fuss. To Chatterjee’s mind, such attacks are just petty and bothersome. I may be wrong, or I may be right, Chatterjee says. It’s just a hypothesis that I found something that is the earliest bird. The thing is, nobody has discussed the material in my paper. Instead they are dealing with the peripheral subjects, which really bothers me. Some people who have never seen this specimen have made all kinds of comments. I’m really getting very tired.
The truth is that these critics are quite willing to discuss the material in his paper, and if Chatterjee is bothered by peripheral subjects like questions about his methods, many paleontologists--including his defenders--think he’s partly to blame for the controversy. I think he’s laid himself open to a lot of criticism because of the way he’s handled it, says Nicholas Hotton of the Smithsonian Institution, who describes himself as a close friend of Chatterjee’s. I mean, he just comes out flat-footed and says it’s a bird. A lot of the acrimony was avoidable.
