18 
the summer of 1840 1 happened to search through a box wherein different natural- 
history objects were stored, which had been presented by the ‘ Kunstkammer ’ to the 
Koyal Natural History Museum, and on this occasion 1 found a very large bird-cranium, 
which attracted my attention partly through its size, partly through its unusual and 
peculiar shape, and by a further examination and comparison with the authenticated 
representations of the Dodo, 1 became persuaded that it must have belonged to that 
remarkable bird. 
“It is very well preserved, only wanting the left ‘os pterygoideum and the ‘ con- 
dylus occipitalis,’ together with the entire border of the ‘ foramen magnum ’ are broken 
away; otherwise it is quite perfect, so that an almost complete description of the 
osteology of the head of this remarkable genus may be made out from it. Although I 
have searched through Laurentz’s ‘ Museum Regium ’ and the MS. Catalogue of the 
‘ Kunstkammer,’ I have nowhere been able to discover any notice of such a cranium 
having ever been possessed by the Collection, and it is therefore clear that it has pre- 
served the present specimen quite unwittingly, and it stands probably under one of the 
many numbers given as referring to heads of unknown foreign birds. I have mean- 
while gradually come to the conclusion that this head is in all likelihood the one called 
‘ Dodo’s head ’ by Olearius in the year 1666, in his description of the Gottorp Kunst- 
Museum, which, when that museum, at least in part, was amalgamated with the 
Copenhagen Museum, found its way there.” (Reinhardt, in ‘Kroyer’s Naturhist. 
Tidsskr.’ iv. pp. 71, 72 (1842). 
About ten years afterwards a portion of the bone of the upper beak of a Dodo was 
discovered in the Imperial and Royal Museum of Natural History at Prague'. 
Such, until the year 1865, was the sum of the remains of this large, flightless, extinct 
bird which were known to have reached 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 Didwn- 
'■ See Annals of ISTat. Hist. ser. 2. vol. vi. p. 290 (1850). 
^ “Es war in 1843, dass ich auf den Gedanken kam, dass der Dodo eine anomale Taubenform sei; ich 
iiberzeugte mioli bald dass diese Aiiffassung die einzig richtige sei, und fing an eine Arbeit iiber diesen Gegen- 
stand vorzubereiten. In 1845 wurde ich aber von meiner Regierung beauftragt eine Reise um die "Welt mit 
einem danischen Kriegsscbiff mitzumacben ; meine Arbeit musste also vorlaufig bei Seite gelegt werden. Sehon 
vor meine Abreise hat ioh aber mehrere sowohl danische wie fremde Naturforscher mit meiner Ansioht bekannt 
gemaoht, und der Beweis das es sioh so verhalt wird Owen finden kbnnen : — 
“ 1. in den Forhandlingar de Scandinaviske Naturforskers Mode, i Kjobenhavn, 1847, p. 948 : und 
“ 2. in Sixndevall, Arsberattelse om Framstegen i vertebrerade Djurens Haturalhistoria og Ethnographien, 
1845-50, p. 254.” — Letter from Prof. J. Reinhabdi to Dr. Aibeei Gtinther. 
