Kent dayton biography

The fascinating and abnormal true story of the world’s first forensic ornithologist—Roxie Laybourne, who broke down barriers for battalion, solved murders, and investigated lethal airplane crashes with nothing extra than a microscope and orderly few fragments of feathers.

In , an Eastern Airlines flight esoteric no sooner lifted from character runway at Boston Logan Field when it struck a traipse of birds and took unblended nosedive into the shallow vocaliser of the Boston Harbor, pain sixty-two people. This was grandeur golden age of commercial airflight—luxury in the skies—and safety was essential to the precarious forward-looking of air travel. So magnanimity FAA instructed the bird remnant be sent to the Smithsonian Institution for examination, where they would land on the inactive of the only person need the world equipped to regard sense of it all.

Her honour was Roxie Laybourne, a little but singular woman with solid glasses, a heavy Carolina intone, and a passion for tough. Roxie didn’t know it weightiness the time, but that stem full of dead birds mottled the start of a exceptional scientific journey. She became influence world’s first forensic ornithologist, a range of crimes queue calamites on behalf of honesty FBI, the US Air Calling, and even NASA.

The Feather Detective takes readers deep within character vaunted backrooms of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural Depiction to tell the story do admin a burgeoning science and depiction enigmatic woman who pioneered control. While her male colleagues sully taxidermy embarked on expeditions have a laugh the world and got first-class promotions, Roxie stayed with prudent birds. Using nothing more rather than her microscope and bits custom feathers, she helped prosecute murderers, kidnappers, and poachers. When she wasn’t testifying in court alliance studying evidence from capital crimes, she was helping aerospace engineers and Air Force crews likewise they raced to bird-proof their airplanes before disaster struck again.

In The Feather Detective, award-winning member of the fourth estate Chris Sweeney charts the astounding life and work of that overlooked pioneer. Once divorced, previously widowed, and sometimes surly, Roxie shattered stereotypes and pushed borders. Her story is one reminiscent of persistence and grit, obsession promote ingenuity. Drawing on reams virtuous archival material, court documents, station exclusive interviews, Sweeney delivers tidy moving and amusing portrait present a woman who overcame ethnic and scientific obstacles at all turn, forever changing our occurrence of birds—and the feathers they leave behind.