With its plump head and bulbous beak, the renowned remains of a dodo at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History have long captivated visitors, Lewis Carroll among them. Now researchers say they have uncovered how the dodo died – a discovery that makes the old bird’s past curiouser and curiouser.
Researchers used a form of CT scanning and sophisticated software to probe the anatomy and habits of the Oxford dodo - the world’s best preserved specimen of the bird – and discovered the animal was shot in the back of the head and neck with lead pellets.
“The shot is consistent with it being very fine calibre fowling shot – the sort of shot that was used to down birds,” Prof Paul Smith, director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, told the Guardian.
The revelation has astonished experts, who thought the bird had lived out its life in London as a money-spinning curiosity.
“We have shown that it definitely did not die of natural causes,” said Prof Mark Williams from WMG at the University of Warwick, whose team carried out the scanning.
Dodos, native to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, were wiped out in the 17th century following the arrival of sailors. While it was initially thought the birds were eaten into oblivion, it now seems likely their demise was down to a combination of factors, among them habitat destruction, predation and competition for resources by the rats, monkeys, goats and other animals that arrived with the sailors.
The Oxford dodo came to the city in 1683 as part of the collection of Elias Ashmole – a wealthy government official, royalist and fervent collector of oddities – who had himself obtained the specimen from one John Tradescant, a garden designer with a penchant for collecting items relating to natural history. In fact, notes Smith, the dodo crops up in Tradescant’s catalogue for his museum in Vauxhall in 1656.
Quite how Tradescant got hold of the bird isn’t clear, but Smith says experts thought they had a shrewd idea, noting that the writer Sir Hamon L’Estrange had recorded in 1638 that there was a building among the streets of London where you could pay to see a dodo.
“Not many dodos made it from Mauritius live to Europe, so the natural assumption was that the dodo that you could pay to see in 1638 had died by 1656 and was in the collection of John Tradescant, and then came to Oxford,” said Smith. “We thought we knew the history quite well, that is the reason why it was a bit of a surprise when we put the specimen in a CT scanner.”
The discovery that the Oxford dodo met a violent end has put a cat among the pigeons of the old theory, resulting in a puzzle worthy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“In a way it raises more mysteries,” said Smith. “If it was the bird that was in London in 1638, why would anyone just shoot a dodo in London? And if it was [shot] in Mauritius, which is I suppose marginally more likely, there is a really serious question about how it was preserved and transported back, because they didn’t have many of the techniques that we use in the modern day to preserve soft tissues – and we know it came back with its feathers and its skin intact.”
Williams added that further research into the shot using chemical analysis could help to solve the conundrum by shedding light on where the lead came from.
The Oxford dodo, which consists of a head and foot, is the only dodo specimen containing soft tissue, making it valuable for DNA studies – a feature some have suggested means the species could, potentially, be brought back. But the remains are no longer on show as they would have been to Lewis Carroll. Instead, modern-day visitors to the museum can see a cast of the specimen, together with a dodo skeleton and an anatomical model of how the bird would have looked.
Daniel Field, an avian palaeontologist from the University of Bath who was not involved in the work, welcomed the new discovery. “Applying advanced imaging technologies like high-resolution CT scanning has absolutely revolutionised palaeontology,” he said. “The types of questions we can address with these data are myriad – it’s great to see that they extend to cracking the coldest of cold murder cases!”