![]() In 1638, Sir Hamon L’Estrange wrote about one of the curiosity displays popular at the time, with “a strange looking fowle,” as recounted in Pinto-Correia’s book. A few managed to escape the island, including two which mysteriously landed in London. Five years later, Herbert recounted, “Here only is generated the Dodo, which for shape and rareness may antagonise the Phoenix of Arabia: her body is round and fat, few weigh lesse then fifty pound, are reputed of more for wonder then for food, greasie stomackes may seeke after them, but to the delicate, they are offensive and of no nourishment,” according to Clara Pinto-Correia’s book “Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo.” But the Europeans brought with them rats, cats, and pigs, which swarmed the island and devoured dodo eggs until the bird disappeared from Mauritius. The first extant report of a dodo was penned by an English diplomat named Thomas Herbert who sailed to Mauritius in 1629. According to Lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Andrew Berry, Portuguese and Dutch traders colonized the species’ home island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean starting in 1598. A WORLDLY BIRD The beginnings of the faux dodo are older than the University itself. Not to mention a man who may have killed to inherit the stuffed bird, the one which would eventually inspire Harvard’s fake. Harvard’s dodo inherits an enigmatic legacy, shrouded in centuries of bloody intrigue: from the bird’s extinction in the 1640s to an 18th-century bonfire that nearly burned the world’s last specimen to ashes. Hedman ’10 said on a recent visit to the museum, after being told the bird was a fake. “It’s like the dodo has died again,” Peter F. A small sign states it’s a model, and it stands alongside a real dodo skeleton, but some visitors leave thinking they’ve seen a preserved specimen-until someone tells them otherwise. “It’s just a replica made from duck and chicken feathers,” said Jeremiah Trimble, the curatorial associate in ornithology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology who dusts the model from time to time. But Harvard’s dodo hides a darker secret. The display’s other extinct birds, such as the puffin-life Great Auk, attest to this one’s rarity. Yet tradition has it that the dodo was not just large but overweight, gravitationally challenged by centuries of easy island pickings.A squat, short, and bloated creature, reminiscent of a turkey crossed with an albatross, stands immobile behind the glass in Harvard’s Natural History Museum. So freed from weight constraints, they evolved into flightless giants. With no predators to deal with and an abundance of food, its ancestors gradually lost the ability to fly. The blame for that lies squarely with the rats, pigs and monkeys which arrived with the sailors and pillaged the dodo’s vulnerable ground nests, driving the bird to extinction in the 1660s.īut what about the bird’s bulky body? Surely that aspect of dodo folklore must hold up? After all, there are dozens of 17th-century paintings and drawings to prove it. And in any case, the dodo’s trusting manner was not the cause of its demise. For a start, the dodo’s reputation for stupidity and slowness is easy to explain: if you’ve never met a predator before then why bother to flee club-wielding sailors? The dodo probably evolved from African fruit pigeons of the genus Treron which became stranded on the blissfully predator-free island of Mauritius. An evolutionary disaster, Raphus cucullatus was doomed to extinction from the day it was discovered by hungry Dutch sailors in the forests of Mauritius in 1598. Rivalling the dinosaurs as a symbol of extinction, the dodo is renowned for being slow, stupid and fat.
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