[ 49 ] 



III. On the Osteology of the Dodo (Didus ineptus, Linn.). 

 By Professor Owen, F.R.S., F.Z.8., &c. 



Read January 9th, 1800. 



[Plates XV. to XXIV.] 



§ 1. Introduction. 



XHE Dodo has long been one of the "curiosities of Natiual 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 admu'able 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 bii'd which were known to have readied Europe. 



The happy perception, by the Danish Professor J. Eeinhardt, 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 theii- 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, dii-ected the ornithologist and omithotomist 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 Bom-bon.' By H. E. Strickland, M.A., F.G.S., F.R.G.S., 

 President of the Ashmolean Society, &c., and A. 6. Melville, M.D. Edin., M.R.C'.S. 4to, London, 1848. 



^ See Annals of Nat. Hist. ser. 2. vol. yi. p. 290 (1850). 



^ " Es war in 1843, dass ich auf den Gedanken kam, dass der Dodo eine anomale Taubenform sei ; ieh 

 iiberzeugte mich bald dass diese Auifassung die einzig richtige sei, uud fing an eine Ai-beit Uber diesen Gegcn- 

 stand vorzubereiten. In 1845 ■mirdo ich aber von meiner Regierung beauftragt eine Reise urn die Welt mit 

 einem danischen Kriegsschiff mitzumaohen ; meine Arbeit musste also vorlaufig bei Seite gelegt werden. Schon 

 vor meine Abreise hat ich aber mehrere sowohl diinische wie fremde Naturforecher mit meiner Ansicht bekaiint 

 gemacht, und der Beweis das es sich so verhalt wird Owen finden kiinneu ; — 



" 1. in den Forbandlingar de Soandinaviske Naturforskers Miide, i Kjobenhavn, 1847, p. 948; und 



" 2. in Sundevall, Arsberattelse cm Eramstegen i vertebrerade Djurens Naturalhistoria og Ethaogvaphicu, 

 1845-50, p. 254." — Letter from Prof. J. Reinhaedt to Dr. Albert GCnthee. 



VOL. VI. — PART II. H 



