Murder most fowl: Alice in Wonderland dodo was shot
A FAMOUS dodo that inspired the character in Alice in Wonderland was shot in the back of the head, scientists have discovered.
Forensic scans revealed the dodo specimen, kept at Oxford’s natural history museum, was shot in the head and neck with a shotgun.
Scientists conducting an analysis of the bird’s anatomy were hoping to create a 3D digital replica of the skull but were left stunned after scans revealed mysterious lead particles.
The research, carried out by the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History and the University of Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), showed the bird had been shot with lead pellets, which were typically used to hunt wildfowl in the 17th century.
Prof Paul Smith, Oxford University Museum of Natural History director, said: “This discovery reveals important new information about the history of the Oxford dodo. The Oxford dodo is an important specimen for biology, and because of its connections with Lewis Carroll, it is of great cultural significance too. “
It had been believed that the bird was brought to London from Mauritius, to be exhibited as an exotic curiosity. It ended up in the collection of John Tradescant, gardener for King Charles II, before being passed to Elias Ashmole, who put the remains in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, before they eventually went to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, in 1860.
Charles Dodgson, the mathematician who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, would regularly visit the museum with his young muse Alice Liddell, and wrote the bird into Alice in Wonderland as a caricature of himself.
The research suggests the bird may have been shot on arrival.
To conduct the research, the dodo remains were securely transferred from Oxford to Prof Mark Williams’s state-of-the-art scanning laboratory at WMG, where he used CT scanning technology and specialist 3D analysis software to analyse the skull and create a 3D digital replica.
He said: “When we were first asked to scan the dodo, we were hoping to study its anatomy and shed some new light on how it existed.
“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.”
Think of a dodo, and 10 to one your mental picture will resemble Tenniel’s illustration for Alice in Wonderland. Its author, Charles Dodgson, had the nickname Dodo, because of his slight stutter. He and Tenniel both knew the real Dodo, proudly displayed in the Oxford Museum, opened in 1860, five years before Alice came out. The museum was a hub of all the sciences, so it is only right that what people call forensic science has discovered a crucial fact about this very bird. The poor thing was shot. It had been thought the same dodo seen for a penny in London in 1638 by the pleasantly named Sir Hamon L’estrange. It was happily eating pebbles. But that can’t have killed it if, as scientists report, its head is full of lead. Now they’re analysing the lead to discover its origins. Murder will out, be the victim never so extinct.