11/8/2023 0 Comments Dodo bird stuffed![]() Lore has it that one curator wrested a head and leg from the flames, Berry said. 8, 1775, according to Pinto-Correia’s book. “The dodo was probably rotting.” The curators, not knowing this was the world’s last specimen, decided to burn it in a bonfire. By 1775, the dodo, now at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, had grown “too tattery,” Berry said. A curious clause in Ashmole’s bequeathal stipulated the museum remove decaying specimens to maintain the collection’s integrity. “With her death the final obstacle was cleared for her neighbor, Elias Ashmole, ‘the greatest virtuoso and curioso that ever was known or read of in England before his time.’” FAD FOR THE FAUX In 1677 Ashmole donated the collection to Oxford University, which in turn created the world’s first University Museum, the Ashmolean. “On 4 April 1678 Hester Pookes Tradescant was found drowned in her own shallow pond at South Lambeth,” the magazine McSweeney’s reported in an 1999 article. But Tradescent Jr.’s second wife, Hester Pookes, contested the validity of the will. ![]() Historians have speculated Ashmole became envious of the collection and connived to inherit the estate through legal means, recording Tradescent Jr.’s will so he would receive the estate when his employer died. By then the menagerie of oddities had grown so large that the son hired a curator and former attorney, Elias Ashmole. continued to collect exotic plants and birds, helping to spawn England’s 17th-century “Cabinet of Curiosity” movement, a craze that would endure well into the Victorian era, and later propel Harvard’s faux dodo into existence. Many, including Berry, believe one of the birds surfaced-stuffed-in the collection of John Tradescant Sr., the former royal gardener to King Charles I. These dodos on display disappeared, leaving some to assume they had died in captivity. In 1638, Sir Hamon L’Estrange wrote about one of the curiosity displays popular at the time, with “a strange looking fowle,” as recounted in Pinto-Correia’s book. A few managed to escape the island, including two which mysteriously landed in London. Five years later, Herbert recounted, “Here only is generated the Dodo, which for shape and rareness may antagonise the Phoenix of Arabia: her body is round and fat, few weigh lesse then fifty pound, are reputed of more for wonder then for food, greasie stomackes may seeke after them, but to the delicate, they are offensive and of no nourishment,” according to Clara Pinto-Correia’s book “Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo.” But the Europeans brought with them rats, cats, and pigs, which swarmed the island and devoured dodo eggs until the bird disappeared from Mauritius. The first extant report of a dodo was penned by an English diplomat named Thomas Herbert who sailed to Mauritius in 1629. According to Lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Andrew Berry, Portuguese and Dutch traders colonized the species’ home island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean starting in 1598. A WORLDLY BIRD The beginnings of the faux dodo are older than the University itself. Not to mention a man who may have killed to inherit the stuffed bird, the one which would eventually inspire Harvard’s fake. Harvard’s dodo inherits an enigmatic legacy, shrouded in centuries of bloody intrigue: from the bird’s extinction in the 1640s to an 18th-century bonfire that nearly burned the world’s last specimen to ashes. Hedman ’10 said on a recent visit to the museum, after being told the bird was a fake. “It’s like the dodo has died again,” Peter F. A small sign states it’s a model, and it stands alongside a real dodo skeleton, but some visitors leave thinking they’ve seen a preserved specimen-until someone tells them otherwise. “It’s just a replica made from duck and chicken feathers,” said Jeremiah Trimble, the curatorial associate in ornithology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology who dusts the model from time to time. ![]() But Harvard’s dodo hides a darker secret. The display’s other extinct birds, such as the puffin-life Great Auk, attest to this one’s rarity. A squat, short, and bloated creature, reminiscent of a turkey crossed with an albatross, stands immobile behind the glass in Harvard’s Natural History Museum.
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