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Lot Essay
First recorded by Dutch sailors on island of Mauritius in 1598, the Dodo was a flightless bird, standing about 30 inches tall, a distant relation of the pigeon family. Linneaus provided the binomial name Raphus cucullatus 1758 and then the charming synonym Didus ineptus in 1766. With little fossil material available to them, some nineteenth century scholars even doubted the existence of the Dodo.
Then in 1865 George Clark (1807-73) obtained permission to dig in a bog, in south-east Mauritius, called La Mare aux Songes, and it is from this excavation that the majority of sub-fossil remains derive. Richard Owen obtained the first shipment from the site and "wasted no time in publicly announcing the discovery, staging highly publicized lectures and public engagements in January 1866, before publishing the description of the Dodo's anatomy in October of that year".
The dodo is now long extinct. Our access to it is through the reports of seventeenth-century explorers, the art they produced and inspired, and the bones that have come to us from Mauritius. Of its diet, habit and call we know almost nothing; and yet it remains one of the most iconic birds ever to have lived.
Then in 1865 George Clark (1807-73) obtained permission to dig in a bog, in south-east Mauritius, called La Mare aux Songes, and it is from this excavation that the majority of sub-fossil remains derive. Richard Owen obtained the first shipment from the site and "wasted no time in publicly announcing the discovery, staging highly publicized lectures and public engagements in January 1866, before publishing the description of the Dodo's anatomy in October of that year".
The dodo is now long extinct. Our access to it is through the reports of seventeenth-century explorers, the art they produced and inspired, and the bones that have come to us from Mauritius. Of its diet, habit and call we know almost nothing; and yet it remains one of the most iconic birds ever to have lived.