New Scientist - USA (2019-12-21)

74 | New Scientist | 21/28 December 2019

I

N 1598, a squadron of Dutch ships landed on

an uninhabited island in the middle of the

Indian Ocean. The crew put ashore and

discovered an abundance of wildlife, including

“a great quantity of foules twise as bigge as

swans”. They killed and ate some, but the meat

was no good, so they killed and ate some

parrots and pigeons instead. The walghvogel,

meaning “tasteless bird”, was off the hook – for

now. Within a century, however, it was no

more. Its chicks and eggs had been predated

remorselessly by invasive rats, cats, dogs and

pigs, and its habitat on the once-pristine

paradise of Mauritius was destroyed. The last

recorded sighting of the bird, now known as

the dodo, was in 1662. At the time, nobody

much noticed or cared.

My first sighting of a dodo came earlier this

year in Oxford, UK, and I very much noticed

and cared. Like many people, I had assumed

that dodo specimens were two a penny. They

aren’t, and the one at Oxford University

Museum of Natural History is a one-off: it is

the only one to preserve soft tissues, and hence

could one day be used to “de-extinct” the dodo

and undo what those hungry Dutch sailors set

in motion more than 400 years ago. That is for

the future, though. For now, what makes the

Oxford dodo especially fascinating is its past.

It turns out it isn’t the bird we thought it was.

The specimen isn’t on public display. It is

kept in a specially made box stored in a secret

location. I was shown it in the museum’s

historic Huxley Room where, in 1860, Thomas

Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce

famously exchanged barbs during a debate

on evolution just after On the Origin of Species

was published. Talk about bucket lists.

Once a complete specimen, all that remains

is a skull with skin attached to the right side,

the mummified skin from the left side, part

of an eye, a skeletal foot, some leg bones,

one feather and various scraps of flesh. But

given what the bird has been through, even

that is remarkable.

According to received wisdom (and the

museum’s dodo exhibit), it was one of the few

birds to make it off Mauritius alive, arriving

in London in around 1636. It was acquired

by one John Tradescant, natural historian,

collector of curiosities and King Charles I’s

gardener. On his death, Tradescant bequeathed

his private museum to Elias Ashmole, whose

collections eventually became the renowned

Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Cabinet of wonders

This isn’t implausible, but it is a half-truth

at best. Tradescant travelled widely to collect

specimens for his wunderkammer (cabinet

of wonders), the only one of its kind in

England at the time. It was kept in a house

in Lambeth, then a village south of London,

and became a tourist attraction. However,

among the many contemporary accounts

from visitors, none mention a dodo or

anything that could be mistaken for one.

When Tradescant died in 1638, his collection

passed to his son, John the Younger, also a

naturalist and royal gardener. Tourists

continued to flock to the house, but visitors,

including a delegation from the Royal Society,

don’t mention a dodo in their accounts. Yet

in 1650, a rival collector, the aforementioned

Ashmole, paid a visit. He persuaded Tradescant

to catalogue the collection. When the catalogue

appeared in 1656, it included the entry “Dodar,

from the Island Mauritius; it is not able to

flie being so big”. Whether or not the “dodar”

was alive at the time wasn’t recorded. There

is also no record of where and when it was

Despite its eventful

existence, the

Oxford specimen,

left, is the only dodo

with preserved soft

tissues. Opposite,

a copper plate

illustration of a

dodo from 1809

A unique specimen of the iconic bird has a more chequered

past than anyone imagined, finds Graham Lawton

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The last dodo