[ 49 ] 
III. On the Osteology of the Dodo (Didus ineptus, Linn.). 
By Professor Owrn, F.RS., ZS, &e. 
Read January 9th, 1866. 
[PLates XV. To XXIV.] 
§ 1. Introduction. 
THE Dodo has long been one of the “curiosities of Natural History,” through the 
rarity and paucity of the material evidences of the bird. 
The dried foot in the British Museum, the dried head and foot in the Ashmolean 
Museum at Oxford, the skull, lacking the lower jaw, and somewhat mutilated, in the 
Gottorf Museum at Copenhagen, were all the parts of the bird known to the authors 
of the admirable monograph on the Dodo and its kindred at the date of its pub- 
lication’. 
Subsequently a portion of the bone of the upper beak has been discovered in the 
Museum of Natural History at Prague’. 
Such, until the present date, was the sum of the remains of this large, flightless, 
extinct bird which were known to have reaclied Europe. 
The happy perception, by the Danish Professor J. Reinhardt, in 1843%, of the 
resemblance of the beak of the Dodo to that of the tropical Doves, generically 
separated by Cuvier under the name Vinago, on account of their proportionately larger, 
more strongly arched, and compressed beak than in other Pigeons, and the still closer * 
resemblance, in miniature, of the beak of the Samoan Dove to that of the great Mau- 
ritian bird, which led Titian Peale to give to the former the generic name Didun- 
culus, directed the ornithologist and ornithotomist to the family in which the most 
instructive comparisons might be made; and the results of these, so far as relates to 
to the head and foot and the bones of those parts, published by the authors of the 
* «The Dodo and its kindred ; or, the History, Affinities, and Osteology of the Dodo, Solitaire, and other Ex- 
tinct Birds of the Islands Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Bourbon.’ By H. E. Strickland, M.A., F.G.S., F.R.G.S., 
President of the Ashmolean Society, &c., and A. G. Melville, M.D. Edin., M.R.C.S. 4to, London, 1848. 
* See Annals of Nat. Hist. ser. 2. vol. vi. p. 290 (1850). : 
3 « Bs war in 1843, dass ich auf den Gedanken kam, dass der Dodo eine anomale Taubenform sei; ich 
iiberzeugte mich bald dass diese Auffassung die einzig richtige sei, und fing an eine Arbeit iiber diesen Gegen- 
stand yorzubereiten. In 1845 wurde ich aber von meiner Regierung beauftragt eine Reise um die Welt mit 
einem diinischen Kriegsschiff mitzumachen ; meine Arbeit musste also vorliiufig bei Seite gelegt werden. Schon 
vor meine Abreise hat ich aber mehrere sowohl dinische wie fremde Naturforscher mit meiner Ansicht bekannt 
gemacht, und der Beweis das es sich so verhiilt wird Owen finden kénnen :— 
“1, in den Forhandlingar de Scandinayiske Naturforskers Méde, i Kjébenhayn, 1847, p. 948: und 
«2. in Sundeyall, Arsberiittelse om Framstegen i vertebrerade Djurens Naturalhistoria og Ethnogryaphien, 
1845-50, p. 254.”—Letter from Prof. J, Reinwanpr to Dr, ALBERT GUNTHER. 
VOL. VI.—PART II. Eg 
