Dead pricey! The dodo that’s set to fetch £500k
IT IS the perfect present for the person who has everything – if you have £500,000 to spare.
A dodo skeleton is about to come on the market for the first time in more than 100 years.
Dubbed the world’s most expensive jigsaw, it was painstakingly pieced together from bones collected over four decades. At 95 per cent complete, it is expected to fetch a ‘high six-figure sum’ at auction in West Sussex.
Rupert van der Werff, of Summers Place auction house in Billingshurst, called the dodo an ‘icon of extinction’, adding: ‘The rarity and completeness of this specimen cannot be over emphasised.’
The dodo, a bird which grew to 3ft tall, was discovered in 1598 by Dutch sailors arriving on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, its only home.
Unable to swim or fly, and with no fear of humans, the birds and their eggs were easy prey for hungry seamen and for the dogs, cats and monkeys brought by the European settlers who followed. Less than a century later, the dodo had become extinct. The skeleton being sold in November was assembled in the early 2000s by a collector who started buying bones in the 1970s. Lacking only part of the skull and one set of claws, which have been reconstructed in resin, it is the only known example in private hands.
A handful of almost complete skeletons are in museums. Most come from bones found in a Mauritian swamp in 1865 and all but one are composites of bones from a number of birds.
Errol Fuller, the auction house’s natural history curator, said: ‘The dodo has a lot of fans, millions. It’s like the Marilyn Monroe of the bird world – but not good looking.’