2030

For a man with a memorable career that spans three decades Albert Brooks doesn’t seem to have that many credits to his name in IMDB. The writer/director of Real Life, Defending Your Life, Mother, and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World has brought us only a handful of films, but they are all memorable for the characters and social insights they bring to the screen. For his most recent work, he has dropped the ‘director’ part of his title to deliver us his first novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, a remarkably prescient bit of futurism that will deserve a revisit two decades from now.

Many of the overwhelmingly positive reviews of 2030 on Amazon describe Brooks’ futurist portrayal of the United States with words like “dystopian” and “black comedy,” but I felt these terms undermine the dire warnings about America’s direction the book presages. There was nothing comedic, even darkly comedic, about the situations in which Brooks’ characters find themselves, only tragedy. To call the world Brooks foretells “dystopian” makes it sound fantastical, extreme, like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but everything Brooks describes is not only plausible, but predicted by economic, political, and historical experts in the media on a weekly basis.

Archeopteryx
Credit: digital cat

On top of Pluto being demoted, the non-existence of Brontosaurus, and whether it’s okay to proposition a woman on an elevator at 4:00 in the morning we can now add a fun new debate for the online scientific community: is Archeopteryx a Bird or Dinosaur?

Analysis of a Xiaotingia zhengi fossil is driving the debate. The animal is “very closely related” to Arhceopteryx according to the researchers, but its characteristics more closely relate it to Velociraptors than birds:

After analysing the traits present in Xiaotingia and its relations, Xu and his colleagues are suggesting that the creatures bear more resemblance to the dinosaurs Velociraptor and Microraptor than to early birds, and so belong in the dinosaur group Deinonychosauria rather than in the bird group, Avialae. Many features led the team to this decision, but the most immediately noticeable are that Xiaotingia, Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis have shallow snouts and expanded regions behind their eye sockets. Microraptor has similar traits, but the early birds in Avialae have very different skulls.

Xiaotingia zhengi
Copyright Xing Lida and Liu Yi

To summarize: Back when Archeopteryx was the only fossil we had that possessed both dinosaur and bird traits, it made sense to consider it the “link” between dinosaurs and birds. Now that we have lots of other bird-dinosaur hybrid fossils from this same period in evolutionary history, we no longer know which of them, if any, is a direct ancestor of modern birds. Therefore, it is no longer accurate to call Archeopteryx the first bird, because there are so many other contenders in the mix now.