IN 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.
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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 obtained, or whether it was even alive when it arrived in the country.
Contrary to popular belief, very few live dodos were ever shipped to Europe and . The most colourful idea about the Oxford dodo’s provenance has it as a live specimen seen in London in around 1638. A retired MP, , describes visiting a house that was displaying “a great fowle, somewhat bigger than the largest turkey-cock… The keeper called it a Dodo.” It is possible that this bird ended up in the Tradescant collection.
Another possibility is that it was collected by Emmanuel Altham of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, who visited Mauritius in 1628. He wrote to his brother that he was sending back a dodo as a gift, but there is no evidence of a bird ever arriving.
The third possibility comes from an Ashmolean museum catalogue from 1836. It says that a diplomat called Thomas Herbert, who visited Mauritius in 1629, “probably” brought the dodo to England. He described the bird in his travelogue and knew both Ashmole and Tradescant the Elder, but if he did return with a dodo, he omitted to mention it.
Regardless of its provenance, in the 1600s, a dodo was just another exotic dead bird among many. It had yet to acquire its iconic status. What happened next, however, launched the dodo on its trajectory to international fame.
Tradescant the Younger had no male heir, so promised to leave his collection to Ashmole. But when he died in 1662, his will bequeathed everything to his wife Hester. Ashmole disputed it, pursued his claim through the courts and won. Even as he was plotting against Hester, he was thinking about securing his legacy. He offered his collection (and Tradescant’s) to the University of Oxford on the condition that it build a museum and name it after him. The university took the bait and the Ashmolean Museum was created. In 1683, the collection – 12 cartloads – arrived in Oxford by barge.
“As the flames rose to its Roman nose, the curator dived in to save what he could”
The dodo, now undoubtedly dead, was put on display. Taxidermy in those days was a haphazard affair, though, and by 1755, the specimen was beyond repair. It was supposedly thrown on a bonfire, but as the flames rose to its Roman nose, the curator dived in to save what he could – or so the story goes. The mundane reality is that the unsalvageable bits were discarded and the rest kept.
For the next 70 years, the museum was a doldrum of decline, known locally as the knick-knackatory. Successive apathetic curators did little more than collect dwindling entry 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 and put 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 . 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.”
“There is speculation that its DNA might be used to resurrect the species”
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.
