Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)

Image 1. Today, the most famous piece of naturalia originating in the Tradescant Collection – and perhaps the most famous single item in the University Museum of Natural History – is this unprepossessing object: the head of a Dodo.  The reason is that it, and the feet from the same bird, preserve the only extant soft tissue of this most famous of extinct birds, allowing the DNA analysis which revealed its relationship to the modern pigeon. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Image 2. The head and feet are all that remain of a taxidermy specimen previously on display in the Ashmolean Museum. This skeleton cast and scientific reconstruction of a dodo form the current display celebrating the creature in the University Museum of Natural History, Oxford. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0), date: 9 January 2009.   

Image 3. The painting behind this exhibit derives from perhaps the most famous and frequently copied depiction of a Dodo, which is thought to have been painted by the Dutch artist Roelandt Savery around 1626 from living birds in Amsterdam. Previously owned by Sir Hans Sloane, the painting was given by the ornithologist George Edwards to the British Museum in 1759, and is now in the Natural History Museum, London.  Source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

A copy of this painting by Mrs Louisa Gunther was presented to the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford by the museum's first curator, the artist's grandson, Dr R. T. Gunther (MHS Inv. no. 58090).

Credit: Howard Hotson (May 2018)

Further information: The remarkably rich pictorial history of the dodo in the seventeenth century is expertly surveyed in Julian P. Hume, ‘The history of the Dodo Raphus cucullatus and the penguin of Mauritius’, Historical Biology, 18.2 (2006), 65–89 (available here). The first video below is focused primarily on the dodo remains at the Museum of Natural History (2:11-5:12), but it also contains some footage of other naturalia from the Tradescant collection (0:00-2:11). The second video contains further footage of both the dodo and other Tradescantiana. Further reading on the Oxford dodo can be found in David A Berry, Dodos and Dark Lanterns: Highlights of Ashmolean History (Oxford 2013), pp. 30-35.