New Light on the Dodo and Its Illustrators 



By Herbert Friedmann 



Curator, Division of Birds 

 U. S. National Museum 

 Smithsonian Institution 



[With 5 plates] 



Among the strange birds that have become extinct within historic 

 times none was stranger, more miusual in appearance, than the dodo, 

 a cumbersome, flightless, huge-bodied, heavy-billed bird, allied more 

 nearly to the pigeons than to any other group of living birds. Fur- 

 thermore, although but little is, or ever was, known of it, few birds 

 became known by name to so many people otherwise not especially 

 interested in natural history. "As dead as a dodo" has become a com- 

 mon expression of extinction, while the term "dodo" has also come 

 to be used as a connotation of stupidity, based partly on the ridiculous 

 appearance of the bird, made widely known by Tenniel's illustrations 

 of it in Lewis Carroll's ever-popular "Alice in Wonderland." 



As a living creature the dodo was known to civilized Europeans for 

 barely a century, being first seen and described by the early Dutch 

 mariners in 1598, and last recorded in life in 1681. Its extermination 

 in its homeland of Mauritius was probably largely due to, and cer- 

 tainly expedited by, the introduction of hogs into that island. For- 

 tunately, a few (a very few) dodos were brought to Europe, where 

 they were depicted by several artists, the chief and most important 

 of whom was Koelandt Savery, Two and three hundred years later 

 nmnerous dodo bones were collected and brought to Europe for study. 

 These, and the scant notes and sketches of the early voyagers to the 

 remote Mascarene Islands where the dodos lived, still constitute the 

 source of the little we know of these remarkable birds. 



In the spring of 1954 the Museum of Fine Arts at Ghent, Belgium, 

 held an important exhibition of the work of Roelandt Savery (1596- 

 1639), an artist remembered chiefly for his picturesque landscapes 

 literally crowded with animal life. It so happens that Savery, by 

 virtue of his being the chief delineator of the dodo from life, has 

 become important to the ornithologists as well as to students of Euro- 

 pean art. In the absence of other comparable observations of this 



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