Raphus cucullatus (Dodo)

[another specialist]

Memoirs on the Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand



www.lib.utexas.edu/books/nzbirds/html/txu-oclc-7314815-2-03-p-016.html

[another specialist]

birdminds.com/Dodo.html

[another specialist]

My own photos taken in the Natural History Museum at Tring - April 30 2009

[another specialist]

My own photos taken in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History - May 27 2009

[another specialist]

[another specialist]

[another specialist]

[Melanie]

Uncovered: 350-year-old picture of dodo before it was extinct
A previously undiscovered 17th century picture of a dodo, drawn before the bird became extinct, is to be sold at auction by Christie’s.

By Alastair Jamieson
Published: 7:00AM BST 22 Jun 2009


The drawing, which dates from the late 1600s, offers a rare insight into the appearance of the flightless bird that was the first recorded casualty of human interference in the habitat of other creatures.

Dodos were the main predators on Mauritius until settlers introduced bigger animals to Indian Ocean island, including pigs. Many were shipped to Europe as curiosities or had their nesting areas destroyed and the species was extinct by 1700.


Painted by an unknown artist of the 17th century Dutch school in about 1650, the unframed 10x8 inch picture is expected to fetch up to £6,000 when it is sold by Christie’s in London on July 9.

The auction house believes it differs from existing images, many of which were drawn from a small number of dodos that were put on display in Europe, some of which were later stuffed.

Little is known about the origin of the picture, which has never before been published.

The inscription above the bird, 'Dronte', was the Dutch 17th-century name for the dodo, although at this period it was also used in a number of other languages including French, German and Italian.

Julian Hume, a dodo expert and a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, said the image was “very interesting but rather odd”.

“The lack of tail is anatomically correct - the ostrich-like plumes normally depicted are exaggerations - but this may be a fault by the artist,” he said. “The angle of the dodo is also novel, showing a 3D pose rather than the usual side view.”

He added that it was likely to have been copied from earlier drawings. “The image is somewhat based on Roelandt Savery's 1626 image of the dodo standing by a rock. We know so little about the number of transported live dodo specimens, and coupled with repeated plagerism of images, factual determination is almost impossible to obtain.”

Another dodo expert, Anthony Cheke, said: “There is always a lot of interest in artefacts like these because the dodo is such a curiosity. This is certainly an unusual image although the drawing is, frankly, not very good even by contemporary standards."



The inscription above the bird, 'Dronte', was the Dutch 17th-century name for the dodo

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/5596737/Uncovered-350-year-old-picture-of-dodo-before-it-was-extinct.html

[Deleted]

Jun 22, 2009 7:21:37 GMT Melanie said:

“The angle of the dodo is also novel, showing a 3D pose rather than the usual side view.”

This is really strange, and in that way it does not fit with any drawing from that century.

May it be, that this drawing is a fake ?

[sebbe67]

Really good photographs you have taken Frank, rally enjoyed them.

[another specialist]

Jun 23, 2009 20:09:26 GMT @sebbe67 said:

Really good photographs you have taken Frank, rally enjoyed them.

Thanks Sebbe

Going to London on Thursday to the Natural History Museum so hopefully a few more photos.

[another specialist]

Leopold Josef Fitzinger

amigapla.net/

[Melanie]

Don't forget this guy from Alice in Wonderland

[another specialist]

My own photos from Natural History Museum of London - June 25

[another specialist]

My own photos from Natural History Museum of London - June 25

[Melanie]

'Hidden' dodo remains on display

A dodo skeleton which remained hidden away from the public for about 60 years has gone on display in Liverpool.

The composite remains of the extinct bird, which originates from Mauritius, are on show at the World Museum.

The skeleton was kept in storage after the city was heavily bombed during World War II and has been in the museum's collection since 1866.

A museum spokesman said it was one of just a handful of examples of dodos in the UK.

Dodos were large, flightless birds whose populations were wiped out more than 300 years ago.

Carved feet

Stephen Guy, of the World Museum Liverpool, said: "This is one of the only specimens in the country.

"There is one in the National History Museum, and in one or two other places."

The skeleton is a composite of remains found on the island in the Indian Ocean.

Although it is almost complete, museum staff only recently realised that its foot bones were carved from wood.
Dodo sketch
Dodos were hunted to extinction about 300 years ago

"The wood carvings were done by Victorian craftsmen. They are so brilliantly done that they were only recently discovered," added Mr Guy.

The fake feet are still part of the display, to show how the dodo remains would have looked in Victorian times.

Some ribs and some parts of the skull are also missing.

The skeleton is on display for about a month as part of the museum's Hidden Treasures series of displays.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was bigger than a turkey, weighing about 50lb (23kg), and said to be uniquely adapted to its island habitat.

It was first seen by Portuguese sailors in about 1507 but numbers were falling sharply by the beginning of the 17th Century.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/8254335.stm

[Melanie]

Some dodo bones have been rediscovered in the Grant Museum (London)

www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/21/dodo-found-grant-museum-drawer

[Peter]

Jun 22, 2009 14:55:24 GMT @noisi said:

Jun 22, 2009 7:21:37 GMT Melanie said:

“The angle of the dodo is also novel, showing a 3D pose rather than the usual side view.”

This is really strange, and in that way it does not fit with any drawing from that century.

May it be, that this drawing is a fake ?

I don't think it is a fake (otherwise an expensive fake...). To me the angle is not that strange. Many painters (for example Rembrandt) painted humans and animals in a 3D pose around that time.

[Melanie]

A new article about the weight of th Dodo

Dodos just got a bit slimmer—or maybe they didn't. A new paper challenges the popular conception that this pigeon, which went extinct more than 300 years ago, was comically plump, instead arguing that it weighed just a bit more than a wild turkey. But in another report, critics say the dodo wasn't quite that svelte.

Dodos weren't always thought of as fat. When Dutch ships first came across them on their way across the Indian Ocean, on the uninhabited island of Mauritius, the drawings that came back to Europe showed a slender bird, almost scrawny, with stumpy wings. But a few decades later, images of the bird had grown grotesquely blubberous.

Why the weight gain? Later artists could have been depicting dodos that were overfed in captivity. Or they could have been influenced by a 17th and 18th century trend in livestock art, which emphasized the delectable fattiness of new breeds of cattle and sheep, says Julian Hume, a paleontologist and artist who has written a book about the dodo and is a research associate at the Natural History Museum in London. "Each person wanted their animal to be bigger, fatter than the last," he says. "I think all these illustrations came from trying to make the bird look even more spectacular than it was."

But, contrary to the popular image, scientists have known for decades that the dodo wasn't as fat as its portraitists made it seem. In the early 1990s, the National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh wanted to come up with a new stuffed dodo for its display of vertebrates. The last known stuffed dodo, in Oxford, had been eaten badly by moths and discarded.

So the museum's vertebrate biologist Andrew Kitchener set about trying to figure out what a dodo would have looked like. In one set of experiments, he constructed a scale model of a dodo—based on bones in museum collections—from wire, cardboard, and plasticine muscles; the resulting bird was quite slim. In another, he weighed dodo bones to work out how much mass they could have supported, drawing on data from the leg bones of other members of the pigeon family. Kitchener eventually concluded that the dodo was a much slimmer bird than artists made it look, probably in the range of 10.5 to 17.5 kilograms.

In the new study, researchers claim that the dodo was slimmer still. A team including Delphine Angst, a graduate student in paleontology at the Natural History Museum in Paris, compiled measurements of 75 dodo leg bones—about 25 each of femur, tibiotarsus, and tarsometatarsus—from 14 museums. From these, Angst and her colleagues came up with a body mass of about 10 kilograms, as they reported last month in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

But in a study published this month in the same journal, another team challenges these findings. It criticizes the way Angst's team used the leg dimensions, suggesting that the femur is more relevant than the other bones; instead, the new team argues, a range of 9.5 to 18 kilograms is more realistic for the dodo's weight.

Getting the figures right is important, says one of the critics, Antoine Louchart, a paleo-ornithologist at the University of Lyon in France, because understanding the dodo's proper body size helps scientists understand how birds evolve on islands. "When you include these extinct species, you see that there's a trend of body size evolution of birds on islands," he says: Large birds tend to get larger, whereas small birds tend to get smaller, which is different from the usual trend for mammals.

Kitchener seems amused by the whole debate. "It's really quite funny, because I did that paper back in 1993, and all the stuff keeps being repeated by various people over time," he says. As to why people continue to be fascinated by an animal that went extinct hundreds of years ago, he credits the dodo's unique appearance. "They're such a bizarre-looking bird," he says. "I'd have loved to see a live one. ... This huge, great pigeon strutting around a lawn somewhere. And the great thing is, we could've just weighed it and not bothered with all this."

news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/04/how-much-did-the-dodo-really-wei.html?ref=hp

[miki2502989]

awesome pictures