IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends ChristopherWren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on thecasual wager that would result eventually in Isaaewton』s Principia , Henry dish』sweighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and endable uakings thathave occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestonewas being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian O some eight hundredmiles off the east coast of Madagascar.
There, some fotten sailor or sailor』s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, thefamously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a ratherirresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolationhad not prepared it for the erratid deeply unnerving behavior of human beings.
We don』t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of thelast dodo, so we don』t know which arrived first, a world that tained a Principia or ohathad no dodos, but we do know that they happe more or less the same time. You wouldbe hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurreo illustrate the divineand felonious nature of the human being—a species anism that is capable of unpigthe deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding iin, for nopurpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn』t eveely capable ofuanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularlyshort on insight, it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a viity you hadonly to cate a to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what.
The indigo the poor dodo didn』t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years afterthe last dodo』s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that theinstitution』s stuffed dodo was being unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on abohis was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo ieuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save onlyits head and part of one limb.
As a result of this and other departures from on sense, we are not irely surewhat a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose—ahandful of crude descriptions by 「uific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a fewscattered osseous fragments,」 in the somewhat aggrieved words of the eenth-turynaturalist H. E. Strid. As Strid wistfully observed, we have more physical evidenceof some a sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived intomodern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence.
So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, lump but not tasty, andwas the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknownas its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strid』s 「ossements」 and the Ashmolean』s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a halffeet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it ed onthe ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey fs, dogs, and monkeysbrought to the island by outsiders. It robably extinct by 1683 and was most certainlygone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see itslike again. W