Saturday, December 24, 2005
Huge dodo news!
There is huge news regarding the dodo, and since we are one of the happy few that have dodo-blogged in the past, an update is in order.
Back in July, I put up a post on the extinction of the dodo, quoting extensively from Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything:
Well, not any more!
They also got some DNA, apparently, so the total bank of dodo knowledge is set to explode.
Bizarrely, the BBC did not write the story of the last intact dodo straight. For whatever reason, the BBC saw fit to spare its readers the whole ugly truth about the fire of 1755:
Don't they mean "was burned on the orders of the director of a museum in Oxford"?
Back in July, I put up a post on the extinction of the dodo, quoting extensively from Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything:
We don't know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don't know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being -- a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purposes at all, a creature that never did any of us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up.
The indignities of the poor dodo didn't end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo's death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution's stuffed dodod was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb.
As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose -- a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H.E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence.
Well, not any more!
Scientists have discovered the "beautifully preserved" bones of about 20 dodos at a dig site in Mauritius....
Researchers believe the bones are at least 2,000-years-old, and hope to learn more about how dodos lived.
A team of Dutch and Mauritian scientists discovered the bones in a swampy area near a sugar plantation on the south-east of the island.
The bones were said to have been recovered from a single layer of earth, with the prospect of further excavations to come.
They also got some DNA, apparently, so the total bank of dodo knowledge is set to explode.
Bizarrely, the BBC did not write the story of the last intact dodo straight. For whatever reason, the BBC saw fit to spare its readers the whole ugly truth about the fire of 1755:
No complete skeleton has ever been found in Mauritius, and the last full set of bones was destroyed in a fire at a museum in Oxford, England, in 1755.
Don't they mean "was burned on the orders of the director of a museum in Oxford"?
1 Comments:
By 
Solomon2, at
Mon Dec 26, 01:11:00 PM:
Unlike dinosaurs, the DNA chains of the dodo bones has only decayed for a couple of centuries, so it may be possible to clone this dodo and bring a species back from extinction!
Not only would this be exciting in an abstract sense, but in a practical one as well: the dodo would be the first major addition to the poultry industry since the turkey was domesticated. By all accounts, the dodo was MUCH tastier!
