In the late 16th century, when Dutch sailors returned home from Mauritius with stories about a large, ground-nesting bird, the dodo was just one of thousands of unfamiliar species that travelers were describing and displaying to European audiences. Read: The smart, agile, and completely underrated dodo And both were excavated during a craze for dodo memorabilia that occurred centuries after the species went extinct. Today, the most complete dodo specimens on public display are two fossilized skeletons, one on the dodo’s native island of Mauritius and the other in Durban, South Africa. The rest of what remains of the dodo, in public and private hands, is fossilized, made up of bones that were buried in caves and bogs for thousands of years. “The dodo remains that were collected while the bird was still alive would fit in a shoebox,” says Leon Claessens, a paleontologist at the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands. The British Museum used to have its own dodo foot, but lost it around 1900. There’s a dodo skull in Copenhagen, and a dodo beak in Prague. The University of Oxford has a dodo head-the only specimen that includes any soft tissue-and a skeletal dodo foot. Before that, no dodo skeleton of any kind had been offered for public sale for nearly a century.Įven for a species that, famously, has been extinct for more than 350 years, dodo remains are scarce. The last such assemblage sold in 2016 for about $430,000. More precisely, the buyer purchased a set of fossilized bones belonging to at least two different birds, dug up and assembled into a skeleton by collectors. Last week, at Christie’s auction house in London, an anonymous buyer paid almost $625,000 for the skeleton of a dodo bird.
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