'We're not looking to make two dodos. We're looking to make thousands': Bringing the world's most famous bird back to life
Emma Hughes separates fact from fiction in the tale of the dodo.
It sounds like a Monty Python gag: late last year, a technology company in the US announced that it was planning to ‘de-extinct’ the dodo.
After raising $120 million in funding, Texas-based firm Colossal Biosciences aims to inject chickens with cells from the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, before using gene editing and selective breeding to re-create the originals. ‘Our goal is to make enough dodos with enough genetic diversity engineered into them that we can put them back into the wild where they can truly thrive,’ CEO Ben Lamm told journalists. ‘We’re not looking to make two dodos, we’re looking to make thousands.’ I think we can take it as read that he hasn’t seen Jurassic Park.
Picture a dodo: what probably comes to mind is Lewis Carroll’s in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, refereeing the nonsensical Caucus race with the geniality of a hopeless country parson. Or, if you’re of a more recent vintage, Bertie and Beatrice in Dick King-Smith’s tear-jerker Dodos are Forever. The portly, flightless bird has become both a totem of extinction and an exemplar of Darwinian ruthlessness: writing in National Geographic, palaeontologist Riley Black described it as having accumulated ‘the air of a bird that stood still with a blank stare as the scythe of extinction lopped off its head’. In fact, the truth is more complicated — and salutary.
The year is 1598 and a Dutch East India Company fleet under the command of Admiral Jacob Cornelis van Neck stops off in what we now know as Mauritius. After weighing anchor in sight of a lushly wooded volcanic island, a fact-finding party goes ashore. When the sailors return, they bring news of flocks of comical avians standing 3ft tall, with stumpy vestigial wings and oversized beaks. Heyndrick Dircksz Jolinck, one of the fact-finders, wrote the first known description of the birds, which he claimed had been ‘named penguins by the Portuguese’ (who had arrived in Mauritius in the early 1500s).
The first Englishman to commit the name ‘dodo’ to paper is thought to have been Thomas Herbert in A relation of some yeares trauaile begunne anno 1626. As is almost everything to do with the bird, the etymology is a bit of a mystery: it could be from the Dutch dodoor, meaning lazy, the Portuguese doudo, for fool, or even an onomatopoeic rendering of its call (later described as being ‘like a gosling’ by the French explorer François Cauche).
Reports started filtering back to Europe of fruit-eating, ground-nesting, clumsy creatures that couldn’t fly, together with sketches made by sailors and even a dozen or so living dodos. The birds couldn’t easily be classified and from the start they were the subject of wild conjecture. The gizzard stones found in their crops were held up as evidence that they consumed burning coals or metal: writing in 1657, the philosopher Samuel Clarke claimed that the dodo’s stomach was ‘so hot, that shee digests stones, or Iron’.
An illustration of the bird. Most images were drawn from hearsay and imagination, as very few people ever saw the bird.
Meanwhile artists set about depicting dodos, the most famous being Roelant Savery, whose The Dodo and Other Birds of about 1630 is now in London’s Natural History Museum. He and his followers were working largely from hearsay and imagination: most had never seen a dodo either living or dead and none of the birds that left Mauritius alive were well preserved in their entirety after death. To this day, almost all dodo skeletons in museum collections are composites of bones from different individual birds.
Early, rather fanciful depictions of rotund dodos became gospel: centuries later, they would inform not only Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll, but attempts to reconstruct skeletons and the instantly recognisable replicas made by the famous London taxidermist Rowland Ward for various British institutions from plaster and goose feathers. Like the Horniman Museum’s blimpish walrus, overstuffed by well-meaning Victorians, Dürer’s armoured rhinoceros and the rectangular cows of 19th-century British art, the dodo as we know it today is a construct — not so much discovered as created by people who actually had very little to go on.
'Perhaps this is why the dodo is such an object of fascination for Silicon Valley types: it resists the mastery of Nature that has always been their ultimate goal'
Jumping back to the 17th century, expeditions to Mauritius continued apace and the dodo waddled unknowingly into a perfect storm. It had evolved in isolation, so was entirely unafraid of humans. Flightless and slow, it couldn’t readily escape even if it wanted to — which it didn’t, if tales of dodos being caught easily by hand and herded onto ships are anything to go by. Visitors destroyed its habitat and the ships’ rats that travelled with them ate its eggs. The birds themselves became provisions, eaten fresh or salted and stuffed into barrels for the next leg of a voyage. In his chapter on the dodo in The Vortex: An Environmental History of the Modern World, historian Frank Uekötter writes that ‘the dodo’s French name, oiseau de nausée, suggests that the bird’s greasy meat left even gastronomically challenged sailors nauseous’.
A handful of dodos escaped this grisly fate, only to be dispatched around the world as gifts. At least two were sent to India and a solitary bird journeyed to Japan in August 1647, arriving in the port of Hakata a month later: according to the diary of Dutch seaman Willem Verstegen analysed by Julian Hume of the Natural History Museum, it was taken ashore, together with a deer, and given to a nobleman.
For many years, the last dodo was thought to have been sighted in 1662 by a Dutch sailor. More recent research has unearthed records of a dodo being killed for the governor of Mauritius in 1673, as well as notes made by his successor of living dodos up until 1688. Extinction was still a concept foreign to science in the late 17th century; it would be more than 100 years before French naturalist George Cuvier proved it was a reality.
After it became clear that the dodo really was gone for good, Victorian ornithologists began trying to uncover the truth of what had been lost: in his famous monograph on the bird, Hugh Edwin Strickland wrote that although dodos were ‘almost contemporaries of our great-grandfathers’, they had become akin to ‘the Griffin and the Phoenix of mythological antiquity’. ‘We possess only the rude descriptions of unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments, which have survived the neglect of two hundred years,’ he lamented. The dodo certainly had a long-standing PR problem: Carl Linnaeus had been so convinced of its hopelessness that, in 1766, he had proposed naming it Didus ineptus (the more sober Raphus cucullatus stuck).
A dodo skull from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum was dissected at the request of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1847 in front of an audience that included Prince Albert. The scientists reached the conclusion that the dodo was ‘a very aberrant member of the family Columbidae’ — in other words, as Prof Uekötter puts it, ‘a pigeon, albeit a really strange one’.
Modern analysis of dodo remains has confirmed their hypothesis, as well as prompting a reassessment of its intellect: far from being so stupid and hapless that it was inevitably doomed, its brain was average sized and it had impressive olfactory capacity, which enabled it to sniff out food on the ground. Microscopic analysis of dodo tissue has enabled scientists to fill in other blanks, revealing that the birds bred in August and moulted between March and late July.
Running in parallel to all of this scrutiny have been a series of spurious dodo sightings: in February 1886, the journal Science debunked English newspaper reports that a dodo had been found in Samoa, explaining that the bird in question was ‘not the dodo at all but the dodo-pigeon, Didunculus strigirostris, a living specimen of which was last year presented to the national museum… this specimen was, at latest account, thriving in the zoological garden at Philadelphia’. At the time of writing, there is a video on YouTube claiming to prove the dodo never died out that makes the evidence for the Loch Ness Monster look plausible by comparison.
There is still so much that remains uncertain about the dodo, from the way it looked when it moved to how it evolved in the first place. Perhaps this is why it is such an object of fascination for Silicon Valley types: it resists the mastery of Nature that has always been their ultimate goal. As Colossal Biosciences’s genetic engineers will no doubt discover, to engage with the dodo is to be continually reminded exactly how little we humans know and how badly wrong we keep getting it—which is precisely as it should be.
