Excerpt from Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

60°10'16"N, 24°55'52"E
Natural History Museum
Helsinki

To begin with, you have to walk past the African elephant and step in through the door at the back. Hanging on the walls are the flayed bodies of fish, frogs and birds. The room can feel ghostly, but visitors wander through the space, attentive and carefree, walking from one display case to the next, examining bones and info labels, and their attention is eventually drawn to it.

First, visitors see the horses, the bears, the seals and snakes, beast upon beast, their brittle bones carefully, imperceptibly attached to one another to form the contours of recognisable creatures familiar from books and zoos, and then they are confronted with this animal and its altogether different remains.

The other skeletons displayed in the room are white and neat; nothing about them reminds us of the bloody, messy work that unveiling the bones from within a living body requires. But this one's surface is rough and worn, yellowed like an old newspaper abandoned in the attic; its ribs and vertebrae are adorned with a filigree of cracks and fractures, and in the places where a bone is broken, its darkened surface reveals the gleam of something lighter and porous underneath.

The bones are scarred and battered. Two sets of numbers have been marked on the ribs, one written neatly in ink and the other sketched in pencil, allowing us to discern nineteen arched pairs. The ribs have been numbered in a delicate hand, but the order of the vertebrae has been daubed on the bones in thick, brash felt tip. In addition, there is a tag attached to the atlas vertebra, a faded archive label, and to see it you have to crouch down and risk catching the attention of the museum's security guard, but from this position it is possible to read, in robust typewritten letters, the words Rhytina Stelleri and the year 1960. But the most arresting thing about this creature is not the marks left by human hand, but its size.

Stripped of its flesh, a bear is nothing but a scrawny, pitiful dog, a horse shrinks to the size of a pony, but even without its hide and blubber this animal makes the other skeletons gathered in the room look like flimsy little toys. If we continue into the next gallery, we see that its sturdy bones stand comparison even with the monumental frame of the humpback whale. Its sheer size commands our attention. Children run up to it shouting "dinosaur!", because that is what they are most excited to see, but their parents hesitate. They have read the museum's floor plan, and they know that the prehistoric creatures are on the third floor, not here, so they lean closer and read the words on the label to their offspring:

Steller's sea cow, hydrodamalis gigas

Excerpted from Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen. Copyright © 2025 by Iida Turpeinen. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.