10 : Stuffed Dodo at the Horniman Museum, London

c. 1700

While the Dodo ‘specimen’ at the Horniman Museum – and in several other museums – is the epitome of how people imagine the species, it is in fact both fake and conjectural.

Stuffed birds – and a stuffed Dodo in particular – are signifiers of many aspects of the human treatment and discovery of the world of birds. The craft of taxidermy underwent an explosion from the 16th century until the early 20th century, though methods of animal skin preservation such as mummification go back at least a few thousand years.

Specimens were, and remain, of paramount importance for anatomical and taxonomic studies, while stuffed animals and trophies were also of great commercial value for most of the last 500 years or so. The skins of extinct birds are among the most valuable financially and taxonomically, and the causes and outcomes of the extinction of a species are the subject of thousands of scientific papers and much debate. Even the very finality of the extirpation of a unique life form has only been widely understood and appreciated for 150 years or so.

The start of the modern cycle of extinction is often dated to 1600, and it is the 17th century which saw the discovery and demise of that most charismatic of columbiforms, the Dodo. The large, grey-brown, flightless, ground-nesting island endemic weighed about 20kg and lived mainly on a diet of fruit. It was part of a speciose and bizarre Mascarene island fauna, much of which we are only discovering now, and most of which has been destroyed completely or only survives in highly threatened remnant or human-dependent populations.

Though discovered by Dutch sailors in 1598 on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, the Dodo wasn’t described until 1606 and had diverged so much from its pigeon ancestors (DNA analysis has shown the closest is likely to have been Nicobar Pigeon from the East Indian islands) that it was given its own family, Raphidae, along with the solitaires of neighbouring islands, and was initially believed to have affinities to the ratites, swans or vultures.

By 1700 at the latest, it was extinct, killed off for food (though reputedly it was only barely palatable) and by the depredations of dogs, pigs and other alien mammals; for the first time in its evolutionary history, the Dodo had had enemies. The species’ passing was largely unsung until the late 19th century, despite its remarkable size and appearance, and unique ecological role on the island. Its behaviour, habits and even its true appearance have had to be pieced together from contemporary explorers’ accounts and drawings, which contain all the inaccuracies of the time liberally mixed up with accurate observations, along with a few partial dessicated specimens from the time and recently excavated bones from caves and bogs on Mauritius, including a whole skeleton in 2007.

The bird itself was frequently depicted as ungainly, somewhat like an obese chicken, but it seems likely that this impression was gained from poorly executed drawings and badly stuffed specimens. Research has shown that it is likely to have been much slimmer than is traditionally thought, and was a quite active running species.

This particular ‘specimen’ from London’s Horniman Museum underlines the bird’s ignominious demise, as no genuine stuffed Dodo exists anywhere – this model is formed from plaster casts of a genuine preserved head and feet, and a manufactured body covered with swan and goose feathers. Even more pathetically, real feathered chicken wings have been attached and the tail has been formed out of Ostrich feathers. It was made by the taxidermist Rowland Ward’s company in 1938.

The Dodo must surely stand as both a monument to the uniqueness of island evolution, and an icon of remembrance as to what can happen to the dozens of isolated evolutionary hot-spots around the globe should we falter in our attempts to preserve them.