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Flightless, large, unable to swim and possessed of absurdly sturdy legs, the dodo occupies a unique position in the Western imagination. It is tempting to speculate that it gained star status by its premature exit. The dodo's sole habitat was the island of Mauritius, which was discovered by Dutch sailors in 1598. Its appearance was a source of wonder to the crew who hunted it for food so successfully that within a mere four decades the species was extinct. Some specimens were taken abroad and appeared in menageries, and at least one was put on display in London, but these too vanished. Indeed all the stuffed and preserved specimens which found their ways to various museums also disappeared, and the only surviving remains of dodo tissue are a head and a foot in the University Museum of Oxford. In 1865 dodo bones were found by an English schoolmaster in an area of Mauritius called the Mare aux Songes. Complete skeletons were displayed in collections and a trade in 'reconstructed' dodos was started by a firm in London using feathers from other birds. The obscurity of its subject's life means that this book is somewhat limited for material. The author points out that most of the literature published about dodos is speculative, and most of the drawings and paintings of the bird derive from a handful of originals, few of which themselves were drawn from life. In this enjoyable book Errol Fuller supplies verbatim all the primary source material about the species - 16 written reports and 14 illustrations, each with a commentary to indicate provenance and reliability. He also lists the museums worldwide which possess significant dodo material and writes about the iconic status of the bird. Drawn by Tenniel for an illustration in Alice in Wonderland, the dodo began to enjoy a rather comic, popular afterlife, not only as a metaphor for extinction but as a familiar personality from the animal kingdom, appearing as logos on letterheads, as various cartoon characters in children's story books, and on a tile designed by William de Morgan. Thoroughly researched and copiously illustrated, this is an attractively laid-out and designed book - as close as can be got to a biography of one of the more mysterious inhabitants of our planet. (Kirkus UK)
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A comprehensive illustrated guide to the dodo: its history, natural history, and its literary and cultural legacy. The extinction of the dodo from the shores of Mauritius followed closely on the arrival of Dutch and Portuguese sailors on the island in the 16th century. Using a diverse number of sources, the author describes the behaviour and myths surrounding this unusual and iconic bird. The first three chapters investigate the dodo's natural history through the use of historical documents, illustrations, paintings, old drawings and literary sources. Its behaviour is examined in the quotes from 16 of the written reports by travellers to the island, and the anatomy of the dodo is investigated from the bone records kept by anatomists and naturalists from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The mythology surrounding the dodo has grown ever since it became extinct. Lewis Carroll's use of the dodo in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" elevated the bird to iconic status and sparked a spate of Dodo characters in newspapers, adverts and cartoons. In chapter four, the author investigates how man incorporated the image of the dodo into literature and the arts to become the powerful cultural icon that it is today. He then looks more closely at two other species: the Solitary Dodo, from the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean and the White Dodo of the Reunion Island. Both are now extinct, but are thought to have been related to the Mauritian Dodo.
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