The dodo’s final legacy Philip Jacobson
In November the first almost complete skeleton of a dodo to go on sale for almost a century comes under the hammer.
In the first auction of its kind anywhere in the world for more than a century, the virtually complete skeleton of a dodo is to come under the hammer on 22nd November, with stiff competition from museums and specialist collectors expected to push bidding as high as £500,000. According to Summers Place Auctions, in Billingshurst, only a small missing section of the skull and one set of claws have had to be painstakingly reconstructed with pieces of resin. Otherwise, 95 per cent of the bones were collected by the unidentified owner of the skeleton, who had spent some forty years gathering them before assembling what amounted to a giant jigsaw puzzle.
‘The rarity and completeness of this specimen of the great icon of extinction cannot be over-emphasised,’ says Rupert van der Werff, director of the Sussexbased auction house. In all probability, there will never again be a similar sale, as the government of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, once the native habitat of the dodo, has imposed a ban on further exports of bones to preserve the island’s natural heritage.
There is something profoundly sad and unambiguous about the phrase ‘dead as a dodo’, universally understood to signify total and irreversible loss. The last reported sighting of this ungainly flightless bird was provided some 350 years ago by a shipwrecked sailor cast up on a Mauritian shore. The dodo had flourished there, but within a century of its initial encounter with Dutch sailors exploring the island, it had become the first known species to disappear completely as a direct result of contact with humans. Slow moving and with no fear of man, it was easy to hunt down for meat – although the taste was widely reported to be nauseating – and nets were used to capture live specimens for display in European museums. But it was ultimately wiped out by a fatal combination of deforestation and the introduction by settlers of predators previously unknown on the island. Dogs and cats, pigs and rats all preyed on the defenceless birds and, disastrously for its long-term survival, also developed a voracious appetite for the eggs that it laid on the ground.
Even today, much of what is known about the Dodo, a distant relative of the pigeon family with the scientific designation Raphus cucullatus, derives from contemporary paintings and vague, often fanciful, descriptions by travellers. What is thought to have been the only complete stuffed bird in existence – originally shipped alive to England in the early 17th century and exhibited to the public – was eventually bequeathed by a collector to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. It was so badly neglected there that it began to rot and eventually ended up on a bonfire, though a dedicated curator managed to rescue the head and foot, which remain in the museum’s possession, guarded like the crown jewels.
Fossilised remains suggest the dodo, whose name is believed to have derived from the Portuguese word for stupid, stood about three feet tall and weighed in at between 23 and 46 lbs. The 16thcentury Flemish artist Roelandt Savery produced several studies, which he claimed to be ‘from live’: they show what one observer described as ‘a disgusting bird with a large posterior’, a distinctive hooked beak and splayed feet that enabled it to wade through ponds
catching fish. There has been speculation that one of Savery’s works provided the inspiration for the sketch in John Tenniel’s delightful illustrations for The
Adventures of Alice in Wonderland that shows Alice shaking hands with the talking Dodo as it leans casually on a cane. Two centuries after the species had been driven into extinction, a Mauritian school teacher and keen natural historian called George Clark set out to explore a swamp known as the Mare aux Songes which he thought might contain preserved dodo remains. In 1865, he hired local sugar plantation workers to trudge through the murky waist-deep water, feeling for bones with their bare feet. Their first discovery was a tibia, then hundreds more pieces were recovered and identified. It is highly probable that many of the dodo skeletons now on display in the world’s museums are composites, containing bones found by Clark’s labourers. One notable exception is the prized exhibit in the Port Louis museum in Mauritius, uniquely composed of bones known to have come from a single bird.
About ten years ago, biologists searching for cockroaches in a hill cave in Mauritius stumbled across a badly decomposed dodo skeleton, which they named Fred after one of its discoverers. At the time, some scientists suggested that it might be possible to extract DNA from Fred’s bones, leading to conjecture that one day in the future this might conceivably be used to revive the extinct species (think Jurassic Park and those born-again dinosaurs).
Meanwhile, the dodo is commemorated in Hilaire Belloc’s poignant ode: The Dodo used to walk around, And take the sun and air. The sun yet warms his native ground – The Dodo is not there! The voice which used to squawk and
squeak Is now forever dumb – Yet you may see his bones and beak