Cracked after 350 years, the mystery of how the world’s most famous dodo died
THE 350-year-old mystery of how the world’s best-preserved dodo was killed has been solved – it was shot.
The famous bird specimen in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History is the only example of a dodo head with soft tissue in the world.
Now CT scans of its remarkably thick skull have revealed that this particular member of the flightless extinct species met its doom by being blasted in the head with a shotgun at close range.
The dodo head has been kept in Oxford for more than three centuries. All other specimens are either skulls and skeletons, or replicas. It was catalogued in 1656 by a London collector, John Tradescant, and later passed on to the museum where it inspired Lewis Carroll, a frequent visitor, who included a dodo character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The specimen was exposed to CT scans, a type of X-ray, and much more powerful than could be used on a living patient, by Professor Mark Williams of Warwick University, who uses scanning to help police solve murder cases.
He said: ‘We found a strange cluster of metallic flakes and particles. We thought at first it was contaminated.
‘We pulled out a pellet. It looked like lead, and lo and behold it was analysed and it was a lead pellet.
‘In our wildest dreams, we never expected to find what we did. Although the results were initially shocking, it was exciting to be able to reveal such an important part of the story in the life of the world’s most famous extinct bird.’
Dodos were native to Mauritius but, being unable to fly and having no fear of humans, they were easy prey for European explorers and the animals such as pigs they brought to the island during the 17th century. The last sighting of a living bird was in 1662.
Professor Paul Smith, director of Oxford University Museum of Natural History, said: ‘The new findings reveal an unexpected part of the history of this specimen as we thought the bird had come to the museum after being displayed as a live specimen in London.’