In the hands of a butcher, a bird’s head and feet are removed from the meat of the body. Whatever the true reason for the bird’s fragmented state, the sectioning of the specimen’s body recalls a cooking preparation rather than typical scientific preservation. While it was long believed that museum staff dramatically cast the long-dead dodo into a 1755 fire, with only the head and feet heroically salvaged from the flames, the more likely scenario, according to Malgosia Nowak-Kemp and Julian Hume, is that the rest of the specimen’s progressively decaying body was disposed of in accordance with the Ashmolean’s original governance and maintenance rules. © Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The specimen’s preserved form offers more culinary questions than answers. The bird, whose precise origins and date of death remain unknown (but whose demise was apparently achieved by a gunshot to the head), ended up in the Tradescant collection that later became part of the Ashmolean Museum, now housed at the University of Oxford. Historian Natalie Lawrence notes that the dodo became a creature “imbued with the moral overtones of the consumptive enterprise” of the Dutch East India Company, in particular.įor an animal of minimal inherent value to humans in the seventeenth century, the sequence of events in the Oxford specimen’s life and death are charged with intrigue. In addition to its stubborn flesh, the dodo’s physical ugliness and allegedly greedy feeding habits made it the perfect candidate for such an emblem. Ironically, for a bird rejected as inedible, the dodo found resonance as a European symbol of gluttony. Dutch sailors called them Walckvogel (meaning disgusting bird) for their tough flesh, not even softened by boiling. ![]() Moreover, shipmen grieved the dodo’s unpalatability as a food that often made up a significant portion of provisions. Its downy plumage was in no way considered decoratively, texturally, or colorfully attractive to an existing market. For mariners who would land at Mauritius during the coming century, the dodo disappointed with regard to both economic and alimentary trade value. “There appear … reasonable grounds for believing that the Creator has assigned to each class of animals a definite type or structure from which He has never departed… and the Dodo, organs are merely suppressed, and not wholly annihilated.”įirst discovered in the sixteenth century, dodos lived exclusively on the then-uninhabited island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. So wrote ornithologist Hugh Edwin Strickland and anatomist Alexander Melville in the 1848 tract The dodo and its kindred: That it is potentially a food object is not readily apparent at first gruesome glance.Ī dodo’s anatomy is best marked by its limitations on flight: short wings and a delicate tail ensure the species is, above all, strikingly antithetical to the idea of a bird, if still technically resemblant of one. This famed artifact, known as the Oxford Dodo, is the only remaining specimen of the extinct bird to still retain some of its skin-in this case, capping its unappetizing skull. Mr Dodgson's pen name was Lewis Carroll and among the children he brought along was a girl named Alice.Not every remnant of past food preserved in scientific collections is, or historically was, enticing. This dodo would inspire Mr Dodgson to create a character of a dodo in a new children's book. In the years that followed, countless people saw the dodo at the Oxford museum.Īmong them was a maths lecturer by the name of Charles Dodgson, who would bring his friend's children on visits to the collection. Musaeum Tradescantianum housed all manner of curiosities - including the then-deceased dodo - which were later gifted to Oxford University. The Tradescant family, in addition to being gardeners for royalty, also set up the first public museum in England. ![]() ![]() The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation's Mr Tatayah says, "the dodo that was on show in London is most probably the one that the Tradescant family acquired." This included a dead bird which he called a "dodar from the island of Mauritius" which "is not able to flie being so big." John Tradescant, the gardener to King Charles II, collected natural curiosities.
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