![]() ![]() ![]() These are copies of the reports of the Dutch Captains that visited Mauritius after 1598, with a number of drawing tracings from the same. ![]() The climatic factors prevailing in the islands have not changed significantly since the 17th century, when these birds were still alive.Īpart from from the classical works on the Dodo, other interesting sources of information were the manuscripts of the Doyen Papers in the possession of the Mauritius Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. In the early summer of 1602, Reyer Corneliszoon, of the vessel Utrecht, had seen and described them in the off-season, when they had probably started thinning and moulting, noting that they "walked upright on their feet as though they were a human being."įor some years, I have been studying publications and data on the large apterous birds of the Mascarenes, acquiring, through numerous visits to the Archipelago in the company of botanists, a general knowledge of the indigenous vegetation. It shall further be shown that Nature did provide weevils (p l.5 ,4) together with the rich oily food that quickly transformed Dodos into very fat birds at the onset of winter, to prepare them for the chores of reproduction. "This, argues Kitchener, would have been an incredible feat for a large bird with a relatively low metabolic rate on a subtropical Indian Ocean island with limited seasonality."He also added that fatness could be accounted for in travelling birds by the biscuits and the weevils that went with them. 1993) and in the New Scientist (b.1993), Kitchener declares the Dodo to have been "a lithe and active bird", questioning Oudemans'postulate (1917) that the extreme fatness of the bird, as described by eye witnesses at certain periods, could be the result of seasonal orgies. In his publications in the Archives of Natural History (a. He then determined its average weight as between 12.5 and 16.1 kg, a result which tallied well with the estimation of Van Wrissen of between 10 to 22 kg. ![]() It should be pointed out that Andrew Kitchener, Curator of the Royal Museum of Scotland, had arrived at the same conclusion in 1993 through somewhat more intricate means: he had cut through Dodo bones to calculate weight stress on the femora and made plasticine life-size models to determine the volume of the bird by Archimedean displacement. European painters like Savery and Van de Venne had probably depicted the newly arrived birds in their still ankylosed and crouched posture resulting from months of travelling in crates. One of the more important revelations of the 1995 Exhibition was the discovery, during the preparation of a parallactic animation of the Dodo, that a correctly articulated skeleton, if projected into one of the classical images, presented a naturally more erect attitude than is commonly supposed. However, it went spreading around, being repeated to this day by many authors right down to the level of children's books. A visit to the nurseries of the Mauritius Forestry Headquarters in Curepipe in 1977, had revealed dozens of beautifully-faring young Calvarias, sprouting in the most natural way, that dispelled the story (Pl. Temple's postulate (1983) that the hard seed of an upland high-canopy tree, Calvaria major, now renamed Sideroxylon grandiflorum (Sapotaceae), could only germinate if triturated in a Dodo's gizzard, which usually contained a large rounded stone. This endeavour was welcome to all those interested in dodology, as it was to the present author who was one of the signatories of the article entitled: "Did the Dodo do it?" in the Review Animal Kingdom (Cheke, et al, 1984). On the 13th of April 1995, an Exhibition was held in the Zoology Museum of the University of Amsterdam on the theme: The Dodo Raphus cucullatus, Didus ineptus.īen Van Wrissen, author of the Exhibition Catalogue, explained that its aim was to sift away the improbabilities and hearsay about Dodo knowledge, through an inventory of all known remains in Museums and a reappraisal of the sources. Conclusion, Part I., The Dodo and its kindred, H.E. In those islands to investigate further the subjec." They may perhaps incite the lovers of knowledge "Should any copies of this work find their way to Mauritius or Bourbon, ![]()
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