From A Million Eggs, Putting Together Clues About Science's Past And Future
Summertime is for road trips. Atlas Obscura teamed up with All Things Considered to travel up the West Coast, from California to Washington, in search of "hidden wonders" — unique but overlooked people and places.
One morning a few weeks ago, René Corado was so excited that he forgot to eat breakfast.
That day, two antique cabinets were to be delivered to an unremarkable building in an exurban office park in Southern California. It's home to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, where Corado works as the collections manager.
Primary among the nonprofit's holdings of natural history objects are about 1 million eggs, representing more than half of all known species and spanning from the present to some 200 years ago. It's one of the largest collections of bird eggs anywhere in the world.
And it was the eggs in those newly delivered cabinets — an estimated 1,200 — that stoked the 52-year-old Corado's excitement.
With steady hands, Corado extracted a mottled, off-white golden eagle egg — meticulously emptied of its contents through a single, tiny hole — from one of
