The Dodo: A Bird with a Message | Christie's

Broadcaster Liz Bonnin and specialist James Hyslop are moved by a rare dodo skeleton — ‘this isn’t just a rare and intriguing curiosity, but represents what humans are doing to animal life on the planet’. Standing 64 cm high (just over 2 feet), with brownish-grey feathers, a tufty white tail, yellow feet and a large black and green beak, the dodo was a strange-looking bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. It was, curiously, a larger relative of the pigeon. The first recorded contact between humans and a dodo dates to 1598, when Dutch sailors ventured ashore on the tropical island. Within less than a century of this initial encounter, the dodo had become extinct. ‘I suppose we could be forgiven for thinking, “Well, that is just a bird waiting to become extinct”,’ says the natural history broadcaster Liz Bonnin. Yet the bird’s reputation for being fat and clumsy is unfair; in fact it was perfectly suited to its environment. In reality, the dodo’s inability to fly was an energy-saving adaptation. And as Bonnin says, the island lacked natural ground predators: ‘Everything was rosy’. Dodos thrived on Mauritius. ‘It lived, as far as we can tell, right from the coast up to the highest mountain peaks,’ explains James Hyslop, Head of the Science and Natural History department at Christie’s. So why did the dodo become extinct so quickly? ‘The portrayal of it as a gullible little animal that sailors clubbed... probably isn’t the whole story,’ reveals Hyslop. ‘It’s much more likely that introduced predation by rats or other animals is what really [drove] the final nail in the coffin.’ Find out more: http://bit.ly/2WnaONK -- Subscribe to Christie's YouTube: http://goo.gl/Vmh7Hf Sign up to Christie's Weekly: https://goo.gl/kc8qpV Follow Christie's on: Facebook: http://bit.ly/2elC9Zg Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChristiesInc Instagram: http://bit.ly/2iJ3lGm Pinterest: http://bit.ly/2elCafM