What the Only Soft Tissue Dodo Head in Existence Is Teaching Scientists About These Extinct Birds

Of all the recently extinct animals, none seem to excite the imagination quite like the dodo – it’s a fact Mark Carnall I have witnessed it firsthand. As one of two Directors of Life Collections at the University of Oxford, UK Natural History MuseumHe is responsible for nearly 150,000 specimens, “all dead animals except insects and fossils,” he tells Mental Floss via email. This includes the head of the only soft-bodied dodo known in existence.

“In the two-and-a-half years I have been here, there has been a steady stream of inquiries about the dodo from researchers, artists, the public and the media,” he says. “This is the third dodo interview this week! It’s definitely one of the most popular species I care for.”

Dodo bird, or Rafus is maskedlived only on the island of Mauritius (b Surrounding islands) in the Indian Ocean. It was first described by Vice Admiral Wybrand van Warwick in 1598, and became extinct less than 100 years later; Sailors’ tales of this bird, coupled with its rapid extinction, made many people doubt that the dodo was a real creature. Historians still debate the extent to which humans ate them, but the flightless birds were easy prey for predators, including rats and pigs, which sailors brought to the isolated island of Mauritius. Because the dodo became extinct in the 17th century (the actual date still remains that way). It was widely discussed), museum specimens are very rare. In fact, except for the subfossils — the dark skeletons on display in many museums — there are only three other known specimens, according to Carnal, “and one of them is missing.” (The fully feathered dodos you may have seen in museums? They are models, not actual animal specimens.)

Since its extinction was confirmed in the nineteenth century, Rafus is masked It was an object of fascination: it was I painted and paintedHe wrote about it and studied it scientifically Unfairly It has become synonymous with stupidity. Even now, more than 300 years after the last dodo walked the Earth, there is still much we don’t know about the bird – and the Oxford specimen may be our greatest opportunity to unravel the mysteries surrounding how it behaved, how it lived, how it evolved, and how it died.

To put it in context How old is the Dodo’s head? Consider this: from the time of Oliver Cromwell to the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, it has been around – and it’s probably even older than that. Initially a complete bird (exactly how it was preserved is unclear), the specimen was owned by Elias Ashmole, who used its collections to found the Oxford Museum. Ashmolean Museum In 1677. Before that it was owned by John Tradescant the Elder and his son. A a description From the collection dating from 1656 she refers to the specimen as “Deodar, from the island of Mauritius; it is unable to fly because it is very large.”

And that’s where the dodo’s provenance ends – beyond that, no one knows where the specimen came from. “Where traders obtained the dodo has been the subject of some speculation,” Karnal says. Some live dodos arrived in Europe from Mauritius, and the museum thought its specimen might have been one of those birds – but new. researchpublished after Mental Floss’s initial interview with Carnall, casts doubt on this theory: After scanning the head, Carnall’s colleagues at the museum and the University of Warwick discovered that the bird had been hit in the back of the head with pellets used to hunt birds in the 17th century. Although the pellets did not penetrate the dodo’s thick skull, “researchers suggest it was a fatal shooting,” Carnall tells Mental Floss in an email. “This new evidence may indicate that it was not the remains of a live dodo brought from Mauritius – unless it was a rather heavy-handed way of bringing down a dodo.”

The discovery raises questions not only about where the dodo was shot and who killed it, but also, said Paul Smith, director of the University of Oxford’s Natural History Museum. He said The GuardianAbout how he arrived in London with his skin and feathers intact. “If it had been filmed in Mauritius, there would be a really serious question about how it would be preserved and transported again, because they didn’t have a lot of the techniques that we use in modern times to preserve soft tissue,” he said. As Carnall says: “The mystery persists.”

Initially, the specimen was just another specimen from the museum’s many collections, and in 1755, most of the body was destroyed Get rid of them Because of rot. But in the 19th century, when the extinction of the dodo was confirmed, there was suddenly renewed interest in what remained of it. Karnal He writes In the Museum’s blog, John Duncan, then Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, made a number of casts of the head, which were sent to scholars and institutions such as the British Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons. Today, those molds — and those molds — can be found all over the world. (Karnal is actively trying to track them all down.)

In the 1840s, Sir Henry Acland, a physician and educator, dissected one side of the head to expose its skeleton, leaving the skin attached to the other side, in a book about the bird by Alexander Gordon Melville and Strickland entitled The dodo and its relatives; Or, The history, affinities and osteology of the dodo, solitaire and other extinct birds of the islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez and Bourbon. Published in 1848, “(it) collects all the known accounts and pictures of the dodo,” says Carnall. The dodo and its relatives This increased the importance of the dodo, and this may have been what prompted teacher George Clarke to take a team to Mauritius, where they found fossil remains of the dodo that can be seen in many museums today.

Melville and Strickland described the Oxford specimen – which they believed to be a female – as being ‘in a fair state of preservation… the eyes are still dry within their sockets, but the horny end of the beak has been worn off, so that it rarely shows that strongly hooked end which is so conspicuous in all the original pictures. Deep transverse grooves are also visible, though less developed than in the paintings.’

Today, a specimen includes the head as well as the sclerotome (a bony feature found in the eyes of birds and lizards), the feather (mounted on a microscope slide), tissue samples, the foot skeleton, and scales from the foot. “Considering that they have been on display in collections and museums, and have been eaten, dissected, sampled and handled by scientists for more than 350 years, they are in surprisingly good condition,” Karnal says.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the dodo, So a lot to learn. As the only extant soft tissue of the dodo, the head has been studied for centuries, and not always in the ways we accept today. “There has been some interest in dissecting skin from the head by Sir Henry Acland,” says Carnall. “Unfortunately, there were also some questionable permissions, such as when he (Melville) soaked the head in water to manipulate the skin and feel the bone structure. Excessive handling over the years has undoubtedly increased wear and tear on the specimen.”

Today, scientists who want to examine the head must follow a standard protocol. “The first step is to contact the museum and provide it with details about access requirements… We deal with inquiries about our collections every day,” says Karnal. “Depending on the study required, we try to mitigate damage and risks to the samples. For destructive sampling – where a tissue sample or bone sample needs to be removed from the sample and then destroyed for analysis – we evaluate the potential importance of the research and how it will be shared with the wider community.”

In other words: Do the potential scientific gains outweigh the risks to the sample? “This can be a difficult decision to make,” Karnal says.

Head examined by an evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro And extinction expert Samuel Turvey So do dodo experts Julian Hume and Parish of Jolyonhas been key in many recent discoveries about the bird. “It was used to understand what the dodo would have looked like, what it might have eaten, where it fits into the bird evolutionary tree, island biogeography, and of course extinction,” Carnal says. In 2011, scientists took measurements from dodo remains — including the Oxford specimen — and reviewed the results. measuring From the iconic 50-pounder that appears in the paintings to an animal that “resembles a large wild turkey.” DNA from the specimen’s leg bone has shed light on how the dodo arrived in Mauritius and how it is related to other dodo-like birds on neighboring islands.PDF). This DNA also revealed that the dodo’s closest relative is the Nicobar pigeon (PDF).

Even with these questions answered, there are a million other questions scientists would like to answer about the dodo. “Were there other species – plants or parasites – that depended on the dodo?” Karnal asks. “What did soft tissues look like?… How and when did the Dodo and the related but also extinct Rodrigues Solitaire colonize the Mascarene Islands? What were their brains like?”

Although it is a rare specimen, Priceless by scientific standards, the dodo head is in many ways just like the rest of the specimens in the museum’s collections. They are stored in a high-quality archival box with acid-free tissue paper that is changed regularly. (The box is being upgraded to something that Carnall says is “a little bit smarter” because it “gets a lot more use, more so than the rest of the set.”) “As for specific storage, we store it in vault 249 and obviously we turn off the lasers during the day,” Carnall jokes. “The passcode for the safe is 1234ABCD…”

According to Karnal, although there are many scientific and cultural reasons why the dodo’s head is important, it is not necessarily more important than any of the other 149,999 specimens responsible for it.

“Full disclosure: All museum specimens are equally important to collections managers,” he says. “It is a great honor and privilege to be responsible for this particular specimen, but every specimen in the collection also has the potential to contribute to our knowledge of the natural world… This week I have been teaching about a species of Greek woodlice and the Oxfordshire slug. We know almost nothing about these animals – where they live, what they eat, the threats they face, and the predators they depend on. The same is true On most living species, unfortunately. But on the positive side, there is a lot of work to be done!