ciencias naturales

Pilar is a biologist and works in the ornithology department at the natural science museum. She gave Valerie, Carlos, and me a personal tour of the bird collections in the basement where they clean, stuff, and catalog birds they bring back from field trips.

It was amazing. There were closets filled with drawers filled with stiff, puffed, and perfectly preserved birds, some dating back to the early 19th century. The smell of mothballs, too, was overpowering.

After our private tour, we visited the museum proper. There was a short hallway lined with aquariums inhabited by depressed fish. There was a room filled with colorful seashells. There were several rooms of giant marine and dinosaur fossils. Apparently, Argentina is rich with dinosaur fossils. Looking at the gigantic skeletons, I saw a resemblance between the saurians and me. Even though we have different numbers of vertebrae and theirs are generally much larger than mine, I saw that the shape and function remained similar. I never thought I had much in common with a lizard, even knowing the statistic that our DNA sequence is about 98% identical. But seeing the rib cage, the metatarsals, the jaw, the eye sockets, I felt strange and as if I was only a smaller, slightly misshapened extant version of the mighty beast.