The evidence

22sources, 1598 to 2018

Every account, picture and bone the plates were drawn from. Each colour on the bird below is tagged with the person who reported it.

  • Tail · ash colouredVan Warwijck's crew, 1598
  • Wings · blackish feathersVan Warwijck's crew, 1598
  • Beak · light green, pale yellowHerbert, 1634
  • Eyes · like diamondsHerbert, 1634
  • Breast · a young cock pheasantL'Estrange, 1638
  • Back · dun or deer colourL'Estrange, 1638
  • Face, legs · grey, yellowNo witness: the painters

Accounts

What people wrote down

  1. 1598

    Account · Van Warwijck's crew

    The first written description

    Wybrand van Warwijck's ships stayed twelve days in the bay they named Warwick Bay. Their journal calls the bird walghvogel, because the longer it was cooked, the tougher it got.

  2. 1602

    Account · Willem van West-Zanen

    Dodaars

    The journal of the Bruin-Vis is the first to use dodaars, roughly “knot-arse”, for the tuft of feathers on its rear. The crew hunted 24 or 25 birds; two were almost too much for one meal.

  3. 1628

    Account · Emmanuel Altham

    A dodo in the post

    Writing from Mauritius to his brother in England, Altham sent beads for his nieces, a jar of ginger for his sister, and a bird. Nobody knows if it arrived.

  4. 1628–34

    Account · Peter Mundy

    Two live birds in Surat

    The English traveller saw two dodos alive in Surat, and wondered, 230 years before Darwin, how a bird that could neither fly nor swim came to live on one island only.

  5. 1634

    Account · Sir Thomas Herbert

    The word dodo, in print

    Herbert's travel book is the first to print the word dodo, and the most careful about its colours.

  6. c.1638

    Account · Hamon L'Estrange

    A live dodo in London

    The only account of a living dodo in Europe. A showman kept it in a chamber and fed it pebbles in front of paying visitors.

  7. 1647

    Account · Dutch traders at Nagasaki

    One reached Japan alive

    Documents first published in 2014 show a dodo arrived alive in Nagasaki, valued like a white deer or a bezoar stone. It is the last recorded live dodo in captivity.

  8. 1662

    Account · Volkert Evertsz

    The last accepted sighting

    Shipwrecked from the Arnhem on an islet off Mauritius, now thought to be Amber Island. Later reports probably describe the red rail, which inherited the name.

Pictures

What painters drew

  1. 1601

    Picture · Joris Joostensz Laerle (attributed)

    The only sketches drawn on Mauritius

    The journal of the ship Gelderland (1601–1603) holds the only known drawings of living or freshly killed dodos made on the island. They show a slimmer bird than the paintings that followed.

  2. c.1625

    Picture · Ustad Mansur

    The slim brown bird at the Mughal court

    Painted for the emperor Jahangir, probably from a living bird in his menagerie at Surat. The other birds on the page are painted accurately, which is one reason it is thought the truest picture of a living dodo.

  3. 1626

    Picture · Roelant Savery

    Edwards's Dodo

    Savery painted at least twelve dodos. This one became the standard image of the bird: very fat, probably an overfed captive or a stuffed skin. It now hangs in the Natural History Museum, London.

Remains

What was kept, and what was found

  1. 1656

    Remains · The Tradescant collection

    A stuffed dodo in London

    Listed in the Tradescant collection in 1656 and moved to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1659. Its head and foot are the only dodo soft tissue left anywhere.

  2. 1665

    Remains · The British Museum

    The London foot

    A dried foot, first mentioned in 1665, hung beside Savery's Edwards's Dodo until the 1840s. Strickland and Melville dissected it; only its bones were left by 1896, and they are now lost.

  3. 1755

    Remains · The Ashmolean, Oxford

    The fire that didn't happen

    Many books say the museum burned its decaying dodo in 1755 and saved only the head and foot. Statute 8 let the keeper move perishing things into a closet; it was taken off display, not destroyed.

  4. 1865

    Remains · George Clark

    The swamp at Mare aux Songes

    After a thirty-year search, the schoolmaster of Mahébourg sent men into the swamp to feel for bones with their bare feet. It gave up the remains of more than 300 dodos.

  5. 1904

    Remains · Louis Étienne Thirioux

    One whole bird

    Found in a cave near Le Pouce mountain: the only complete skeleton of a single dodo, now in the Natural History Museum, Port Louis.

  6. 2005

    Remains · International Dodo Research Project

    Back in the swamp

    A new excavation at Mare aux Songes found bones of at least 17 dodos, some of one bird still lying in place.

  7. 2018

    Remains · Scans of the Oxford head

    Lead shot

    The skin and bone of the Oxford head contain lead shot. The bird was shot, either before it was shipped to England or after it arrived.

Studies

What the bones and scans say

  1. 1848

    Study · H. E. Strickland and A. G. Melville

    It was a pigeon

    The Dodo and Its Kindred dissected the Oxford head and foot and argued, against ridicule, that the dodo was a giant ground pigeon.

  2. 1866

    Study · Richard Owen

    A skeleton built from a painting

    Owen's first reconstruction followed Savery's fat bird and came out too squat. More bones arrived in 1869 and he stood it up straighter.

  3. 2002

    Study · Beth Shapiro and colleagues

    Its nearest living relative

    DNA from a bone of the Oxford specimen put the dodo among the pigeons. Its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon.

  4. 2016

    Study · CT scans and brain casts

    Weight and wits

    Scans of composite skeletons put a wild dodo at 10.6–14.3 kg. Its brain was in proportion like a pigeon's, so it was probably about as clever as one.

From these to the plates

Every plate prints its sources in the margin

Seven plates, 420 × 297 mm, and a 48-page booklet with each account and picture above in full. €58.

See the folio Back to the witnesses