Every bird alive still carries the instructions for a dinosaur.
For six years, geneticist Julian Thorne has studied those instructions in a university lab, where reading them was as far as anyone would let him go. Now, on his mother's farm in north Florida, behind a padlocked door in a barn that has stood for a century, he has found a way to switch them back on.
It starts with secrets. Equipment paid for in cash. Eggs candled in the dark after midnight. A laboratory almost no one knows exists.
His mother, Ruth, knows enough to be afraid, and loves him too much to say no. So she keeps his secret too.
But secrets grow, and so do the things you hide.
Then one summer, the whole family comes home to the farm for the reunion, unaware of what he has been raising.
C. A. Breier has been hooked on dinosaurs since his grandparents gave him a toy T. rex when he was a boy. He still has it, more than thirty years later. He collects fossils, reads everything he can find on paleontology and prehistoric life, and shares his home with cockatiels after years of rescuing birds.
That lifelong pull between birds and the animals they came from became Atavism, his first novel.