Dr. Hinderthroppe and Ms. Sweetwater had first bonded over their mind collections back when their times at University overlapped, he specializing in those with notable frontal lobes, and she with an obsession with the involuntary systems.
What had ensued in those late night labs over moodily lit dissection trays and grey matter was known only to them, but many were prone to wonder and speculate.
The inevitable rumors made their way first to the campus newspaper, and then to the local county rag, where the fish-wrap pushed damning theories and slanderous allegations. The University brass didn't mind until the indictments went past the personal and started to undermine the school and the program itself.
Then the rumors took a bizarre twist: stories of midnight experiments on reanimating a severed dog's head or in the almost comical vein of a brain race with electrical stimulus motivating the wrinkle objects with convulsions towards a finish line.
Concerned and frightened citizens wrote to the editorial pages, clamoring for a federal investigation, citing breeches of various moral and ethical codes and transgressions to the very heart of the civilized human fabric . By the time local officials obtained the necassary warrant and broke down the locked laboratory doors they found only what looked like the traces of several large snails on sterile steel tables and a half full bag of Purina dog chow. Hinderthroppe and Sweetwater had vanished.
There were scattered reports in Brazil and uncomfortable chatter around animal shelter water coolers. But in truth they had gone deep into the amazon in search for a specific species of Bird of Paradise with an abnormally sized cranium.
Records that were only recently made public revealed a puzzling course to the Amazon. Ship manifests and airline feeds showed names like Havana, Mississippi, Portsmouth, and Algiers. Somehow security at each point kept letting their luggage pass; "It's amazing what a "SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH MODELS" sticker and nonsensical but official sounding missives on University letterhead can get you."
As more their path was revealed it became clear that somehow there were more malevolent forces outside of bad press in play here. They were not searching for remarkable specimens or hiding from bad press. No, they were flee like Hell's hounds were on their heels.
A lone pre-doc intern had at least the clues to what those Hell's hounds looked like, and why they encouraged a depraved lust for large and curious cerebrums amongst themselves. The press did not know about young Robert Pleighchild, not even the student body knew of him, and since he hacked the University's servers, there was no record of his work within the strange H&S brain program as of the police raid on the campus.
Even outside of Robert's curious absence from the servers there wasn't much to find. There was no birth record despite the fact that any doctor bringing THAT into the world would definitely remember and maybe even reconsider their Hippocratic Oath.
All signs pointed to zombie/ Frankenstein creation of mythical gruesome appearance but with brains in the unlikeliest of places. The truth was even more horrifying.
This was the product of years of careful and dedicated research, not some slipshod grave robbers with an expensive electrical bill. No, this was an abomination and the pinnacle of cognitive science all wrapped in one horrifying package.
But, with no signs of struggle, why would parents abandon their son/ cog-sci-dissertation-gone-fantastically, inexorably-wrong? Answers were to be found in the outsized skull of an extremely rare and disgusting bird in the Amazon.
Sure the colorful and bizarre plumage is what drew most to follow this avian oddity, but plucked suddenly the skull was the most notable feature. The Osterwind had a brain that was not divided in two but into three separate hemispheres.
It was near extinction for good reason. Any one of the three brain spheres would be equal or greater in size and capacity to any bird of matching size. The weight of the massive brain alone made any voluntary movements for newly hatched chicks an evolutionary impossibility, a handicap the jungle's predators were wont to exploit. But should the chick go against all odds and reach adulthood - egg snatchers and nest robbers beware.
The only other observational report of the species by a relatively unknown Dr. John Goodspeed indicated that they were as smart as dolphins but with their motor functions split three way they could go from stunning coordination to a drunken prom date instantly. Maturity would decrease incidents of clumsiness but it would never completely vanish.
