76 | New Scientist | 21/28 December 2019
fees as the specimens rotted. Interest in the
dodo was as dead as the proverbial. By the early
19th century, naturalists even doubted that it
had ever existed. There were only two known
specimens: a shrivelled foot in the British
Museum (now lost) and the Oxford dodo,
the head of which was rumoured to belong
to a vulture and the foot to a turkey.
But in 1840, a long-lost skull turned up
in the Royal Natural History Museum in
Copenhagen and, in 1847, the upper portion
of a beak surfaced in Prague. Biologists
realised that the creature wasn’t mythical
but extinct – a fairly new concept at the
time – and scientific interest soared.Dodo in Wonderland
Then along came Alice. In 1860, the
Ashmolean’s biological specimens were
transferred to the brand-new Oxford
University Museum of Natural History,
which became a regular haunt of the Reverend
Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis
Carroll. He was captivated by the dodo –
perhaps because he had a stutter and would
introduce himself as Charles Do-do-dodgson –
and, in 1865, he put a fictional one into
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. That same
year, a hoard of semi-fossilised dodo bones
was discovered in a swamp in Mauritius.
They were snapped up by museums andput on display. Dodomania swept the world.
Although there are now dodo bones galore,
the Oxford specimen is still special. The soft
tissue that remains has inevitably led to
speculation that its DNA might be used to
resurrect the species. In 2002, mitochondrial
DNA was extracted and analysed, confirming
that the dodo was a gigantic flightless pigeon.
But a complete nuclear DNA sequence has yet
to be obtained, and might never be. “This
particular dodo is not in good shape, DNA-
preservation-wise. Rumour has it that it was
boiled to get the flesh off of it,” says Beth
Shapiro at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. Advances in sequencing technology
could come to the rescue, according to Paul
Smith, director of the museum. Even then,
bringing the dodo back to life is unlikely,
says Shapiro. “De-extinction is complicated.
Birds are particularly complicated.”Nonetheless, the Oxford dodo still keeps on
surprising. Last year, all ideas about its origins
were thrown into a tailspin.
To learn more about dodo anatomy,
Smith’s team put the head into an industrial-
strength CT scanner. “We wanted to get a
three-dimensional model of the skull to share
with other scientists,” says Smith. They got
it, but they also got an explosive shock. “We
saw these bright spots, which turned out to
be small lead pellets embedded in the skin
and the bone, concentrated at the back of
the head and the top of the neck,” he says.
The dodo had been shot. Although the
pellets didn’t penetrate the skull, the injuries
would have been fatal.
“This is one of those discoveries that leads
to more questions than answers,” says Smith.
“If it is the bird that L’Estrange saw in London,
why on earth would anyone shoot it in the back
of the head?” For now, he thinks the most likely
explanation is that the dodo was killed in
Mauritius. “But how was it brought back in that
condition? It was a whole bird when it came to
Oxford. The journey would have taken weeks.”
Smith and his team continue with their
inquiries. The next step is to analyse the
shot to work out where the lead was mined.
“Each lead ore field has different isotopic
characteristics and if we can provenance the
shot, that might begin to tie things down,” he
says. “We might be able to determine whether
it’s Dutch shot, German shot or English shot.”
Another possible clue could come
from ballistics. The pellets are tiny – just
0.7 millimetres in diameter – and appear to be
specialist “fowling shot”, which had just been
invented in the early 17th century. That means
it would have been used in a gun designed for
killing birds. If the shot can be tied to a specific
type of firearm, that might help to narrow
down the suspects further.
Beyond that, who knows? “It begins to go
into the category of perpetual mystery,” says
Smith. Perhaps the Oxford dodo will never rise
like a phoenix from the flames. But with new
techniques, there is always hope. Surely, there’s
life in the old bird yet. ❚Graham Lawton is a features
writer at New Scientist. He is
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The Oxford Dodo exhibit
in the Oxford University
Museum of Natural HistoryGREG
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