It was a Sunday morning and my gumboot-wedded feet and I were strolling languidly through a landscape carpeted in snow. It stretched all the way up the valley and past the scoria cones where it hugged the majestic peaks of the interior with a delightful frigidity. The air was so crisp and still; a tranquil remnant of the storm’s wake. The only inklings of sound were the distant murmurs of chattering king penguins and the intermittent cries of giant petrels. I thought about how strangely dinosaur-like these petrels sounded and began imagining them as the reptiles from which they descended. I came across a colony and stopped and stared at them like a Japanese tourist; my brain twitching as it tried to unravel the immediate mysteries surrounding the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. Why did dinosaurs suddenly develop feathers? What did they use them for if they couldn’t fly? And how did they even develop feathers in the first place? I thought about this long and hard and eventually ...