The fragmented biography of the Oxford Dodo

We are taking a bit of a different direction with today’s animal-object, but I think you are going to find it exciting as it even includes a bit of an animal murder mystery element! In the previous episodes in this series I’ve mostly spoken about animal-objects on a species level. However, I’ve been a bit conscious while writing these episodes, (and this has been an ongoing question within my PhD research in general) that while a lot can be gained from thinking about the objects at a species level, this kind of story-telling often fails to fully acknowledge the specific biographies of individual animals. 

So, I’d like to try and remedy this today by trying to trace the life and afterlife of one particularly famous individual bird. Let me introduce you to the splendid museum animal-object which is the Oxford dodo. 

Object Focus: The Oxford Dodo

The Oxford Dodo is pretty emblematic to the city of Oxford. Unlike the other objects we’ve focused on so far which are housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Oxford Dodo is part of the Oxford University Natural History Museum, which is actually next door to the Pitt Rivers.

The remains of the Oxford Dodo. Photo: Oxford University Natural History Museum

The Oxford Dodo is a really important and famous specimen for a number of reasons, despite the fact that today the specimen now only consists of a single foot and mummified head. As one of very few surviving dodo specimens in existence (one of 26 I think) and the only one which also includes soft tissue material, the Oxford Dodo holds a uniquely valuable place for the scientific study of the species, particularly for studies such as DNA analysis. 

Today only a cast of the head and foot can be seen by visitors of the museum, with the original specimen kept safely in storage.  Despite its fragmentary nature, it continues to be one of the defining specimens for the museum, whose social media and marketing tags are all “More than a dodo”. It is seen as a mascot for Oxford, represented even in the gargoyles of Oxford’s largest library, the Bodleian and perhaps most famously was likely the inspiration for the character of Dodo in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It therefore holds an important place within both scientific and cultural spheres. 

A brief history of the dodo

I think probably most people will be at least vaguely familiar with the fate of the dodo as a species, so I’m not going to dwell too much on exploring the overall narrative of dodo extinction, because I think it might make us lose track of the individual biography of the Oxford dodo. However, it is helpful I think to give a very brief context to how the dodo became so emblematic of extinction in our imaginations.

Dodos were native to the island of Mauritius up until the 17^th century. They hold a tragic record for having one of the shortest periods between scientific discovery and extinction; their first documentation being in 1598 by Dutch explorers aboard some of the first expedition ships to Indonesia and the last confirmed living sighting being just a few decades later in 1662. Their decline was likely due to a combination of factors including the introduction of rats, cats and dogs to the island. Up until today, dodos are often framed as the original poster children of human-induced extinction narratives, ungainly, flightless icons reminding us of the irreversibility of human impact on the world. 

The life of the Oxford dodo

So amidst this tragic narrative of the species that we are probably all familiar with, is it possible to untangle and trace a specific biography for the life and afterlife of the individual that became the iconic Oxford dodo? Quite a few people have definitely tried!

There aren’t any definitive records of what its life as a living bird might have been prior to its death and museumification, but we do have some clues.  Although now housed as part of the Oxford Natural History Museum, the dodo was originally part of the Tradescant collection, whose original London location in Vauxhall is known for being the first publicly displayed museum in Britain. The dodo can be found in the 1656 catalogue of the collection, listed as “‘Dodar, from the Island Mauritius; it is not able to flie being so big”. This entry in the Tradescant catalogue has been suggested by some researchers to point to the possibility that the specimen itself could be linked to records of living dodos in London in that period. 

There are very few records of live dodos being transported and surviving the journey from Mauritius to Europe (as you can imagine, it was a pretty arduous journey), but there is one significant record of a live Dodo in the UK. It is described by a politician called Sir Hamon L’Estrange, recounting an experience he had in 1638 of seeing a live Dodo in London as part of a paid exhibit. He describes entering a house in London, having seen an advertisement outside, and viewing a large bird which the keeper describes as a dodaar. 

Given the timing of this description and the shared London context, some have posited that the dodo described here could have been the Oxford Dodo, who having lived in captivity as a kind of circus exhibit, may have died sometime between 1638 and 1656 and been donated to the Tradescant collection. Unlike its present state in the natural history museum, at the time it entered the Tradescant collection, it seems like the Oxford dodo started off as a much better preserved, whole body skin. Some have argued that given the presence of what sounds like a significant amount of soft tissue, and the seemingly limited likelihood of a dead bird specimen travelling without significant decay from Mauritius, it might be possible that the Oxford dodo could have been the same individual exhibited in London which L’Estrange saw in 1638. So in theory, the Oxford Dodo could have led a pretty extraordinary life before entering the museum. 

More recent clues in the dodo mystery

This is of course quite an interesting and exciting story to spin – the idea of this lone Dodo surviving the long journey from Mauritius, living an exotic life in London being marvelled at by the public before dying in some vague way and its body entering the UKs first public museum collection and surviving as an object all the way to the present day. And up until recently, there wasn’t really any evidence to point towards or away from this theory, all was just quite fun speculation based on circumstantial links. 

More recently however, more clues about the life and death of the Oxford dodo have emerged excitingly, and this time it was the dodo’s body itself which provided evidence which adds a whole new layer of mystery to the story of the Oxford dodo’s demise. 

In 2018, researchers at the University of Warwick undertook non-destructive CT scans of the dodo’s head and foot, to try and understand more about the specimen. What they found very surprisingly was traces of lead shot in the dodos skull, showing that it was most probably shot in the head and likely killed. This unexpected discovery seems to throw a bit of a spanner in the works of the narrative that the bird might have lived an exceptional London life before dying of natural causes, as it seems a bit unlikely that anyone would shoot a prized attraction in the head with a hunting rifle. The researchers suggest therefore that this might point towards the possibility that the Dodo was in fact killed in Mauritius, and its body somehow made the journey back to Britain relatively intact.

The study of course doesn’t give any definitive answers about the life of the Oxford Dodo, but it does definitely complicate the picture even further. I was quite amused when researching this to see all the articles which were published by the British press in 2018 that framed this as a shocking murder mystery though. The likely demise of the Oxford Dodo doesn’t really seem that remarkable to me, this story of the death and afterlife of museum specimens starting with an encounter with a hunter’s gun doesn’t feel particularly new or unexpected, but I suppose set against a preconceived idea of a cosmopolitan circus bird, new evidence that the Oxford Dodo’s demise could have been both violent and yet pretty unremarkable is quite a big shift. 

A fragmented afterlife

So I guess the bottom line is that beyond knowing it was probably shot, we don’t have much information about the Oxford Dodo’s life, despite its fame and influence as an individual. By comparison, we know a lot more about its afterlife once it enters the museum world. 

We know it entered the Tradescant collection sometime before 1656, and the dodo then came from Oxford to London in 1683 as part of a bequest to the University of Oxford, ultimately ending up in the Natural History museum collection. 

Between then and now, the dodo’s afterlife has included many events which cement it as a particularly interesting specimen for thinking about the biographies of museum objects. The fact that despite the Dodo entering the collection as a whole body seemingly, its journey within the museum collection has resulted in its fragmentation and decay, despite the best efforts of museums often to present a picture of themselves as guardians of stability and stasis for objects. The precise details of how the Oxford Dodo went from a full body to just a head and a foot is a little unclear. There’s been quite a persistent rumour over the years that the reason for his current fragmented state is because at some point during the early period of the Natural History Museum’s existence the rest of the specimen was set on fire by inexperienced curators in an attempt to treat it for pests, but this has largely been debunked, in favour of the less exciting but more probable reality of slow degradation which might be expected from an object made from organic matter that is over 300 years old. The guardianship of the museum institution hasn’t spared the Oxford Dodo’s body from being transformed by processes of time. 

Despite having the original specimen, the museum displays a cast replica, which I think is also a really interesting component of its story. Not only has the body of the Oxford dodo changed over time, the role of the dodo as an emblem of extinction had an interesting impact on the Oxford Dodo’s influence as an individual specimen. Most natural history museums want to communicate extinction narratives to their visitors, and what better object to represent this than a dodo. The problem being of course that original Dodo specimens are exceedingly rare, so many museums have gone down the route of displaying replicas instead. From about the 1820s, casts of the Oxford Dodo started to be distributed to museums around the UK and further afield, with one presented to the British museum in 1828 and others following suit in the following decades, with one cast ending up as far as New Zealand. This has meant that the Oxford Dodo, through processes of casting and replication, has become a particularly geographically distributed individual. The boundary between individual specimen and species representative has become pretty blurred, the Oxford Dodo in some ways exists in museums all over the world, so tracing an individual, spatially-situated biography becomes ever more complicated.

Extinction biographies in the museum

The processes of transformation that the Oxford dodo has undergone are particularly resonant in the context of the dodo’s extinct status I think. We like to imagine that museums are places of safety and stability for ensuring the continued existence of objects, but as this example shows, this is often not the truth. The stakes seem especially high for a species like the dodo, whose physical bodily traces on the Earth are now limited to these few small fragmentary specimens in museums, and it seems like at some point in the future, we may even experience a second kind of extinction event for the dodo, where not only does its living body cease to exist, but perhaps also traces of its dead body too. Museums try to resist these processes, and extend the presence of individual specimens through practices of replication and representation, but I wonder a little whether despite being a particularly famous specimen, even the Oxford dodo’s individuality is pretty hard to maintain and its boundaries overlap with broader narratives and representations across time and space.

This also raises questions about the possibility of animal biography I think, especially if the idea of biography extends to the afterlives of animals as museum specimens. As we’ve seen with the death of the dodo, oftentimes these biographies only become traceable at the death of the animal, deaths which often occur through lethal encounters with humans, at the end of a shotgun. Museum documentation perhaps improves our chances of tracing individual animal-objects across time and space, and shed light on the continued transformations and processes which occur in the afterlives of animals as they exist within collections, but being placed in a museum space does not equate to maintaining a simple, continued or stable existence of individual animal biography that we might seek to trace.