However, she wouldn’t have had much exercise and probably became fat very quickly. On board ship our dodo would have been fed on a diet of ship’s biscuits, which, if she was anything like similar species, she probably enjoyed very much. However there is every chance that she survived the long journey. Unfortunately there are no records confirming the dodo’s safe arrival. Altham’s bird sailed to England aboard a ship called The William, under the captaincy of a Mr Perce. Away from home for many years, he seems to have wanted the bird to become a new family pet and he wrote to his brother telling him to expect its delivery.
However one possibility is that she left in around 1628, courtesy of the English diplomat Emmanuel Altham.Īround that time Altham sent a live dodo from Mauritius as a present to his family. We don’t know how old she was when she was captured and spirited away to Europe. This bird hatched from her mother’s single white egg on a grassy bed, deep in the forests of Mauritius. We can’t accurately pin down the gender of this individual, but the scant evidence suggests it was a female. For around 300 years the world’s only preserved dodo remains have resided at Oxford University. Today there is only one place you can see the face of a real dodo. ‘Even a long boiling would scarcely make them tender,’ reported a 17th- century Dutch ship’s captain. For possibly the last time in its existence, the dodo, a member of the pigeon family, was lucky. It turns out it isn’t the bird we thought it was.Until comparatively recently mankind’s first question on discovering any new species was, ‘what does it taste like?’ The answer to this question could be very important to the future of that species, making the difference between survival and extinction. For now, what makes the Oxford dodo especially fascinating is its past. 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. Like many people, I had assumed that dodo specimens were two a penny. My first sighting of a dodo came earlier this year in Oxford, UK, and I very much noticed and cared. At the time, nobody much noticed or cared. The last recorded sighting of the bird, now known as the dodo, was in 1662. 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. Within a century, however, it was no more. The walghvogel, meaning “tasteless bird”, was off the hook – for now. They killed and ate some, but the meat was no good, so they killed and ate some parrots and pigeons instead. The crew put ashore and discovered an abundance of wildlife, including “a great quantity of foules twise as bigge as swans”. IN 1598, a squadron of Dutch ships landed on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Despite its eventful existence, the Oxford specimen is the only dodo with preserved soft tissues.
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