Dodo devotees, here's your chance: Rare assembled skeleton up for auction

This is the first time in over 100 years that a nearly-full dodo bird skeleton has been offered for sale.

|
Gareth Fuller/PA/AP
Auction house employee Lindsay Hoadley prepares an almost complete Dodo skeleton as it is displayed at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, southern England Thursday Aug. 25, 2016, where It will be the first of its kind to come up for sale in nearly 100 years. The skeleton will feature in the auction house's fourth Evolution sale in November.

The dodo bird may be extinct, but you can still buy one, thanks to one collector who assembled an entire dodo skeleton.

The skeleton, which comes from a private collector who bought the bones throughout the 1970s and '80s, is 95 percent complete and will be sold at the Summers Place Auctions in Britain, The Independent reports. It was about 10 years ago when the collector realized that he had nearly enough bones to complete the skeleton, which was only missing a section of the skull and one claw. Both parts have been reconstructed in anticipation of the sale. 

While individual dodo bones have come up for sale throughout the last century, this is the first time a complete, or nearly complete skeleton has been up for sale since 1914.

“The rarity and completeness of this specimen cannot be over emphasized, and it provides a unique opportunity for an individual or an institution to own a specimen of this great icon of extinction,” Rupert van der Werff, the director of the auction house, told The Independent.

There is no price guide for the skeleton, but it expected to go for quite a lot.

“The majority of auction estimates are based on precedent of similar pieces being offered, which is impossible in this case, so given its rarity and desirability, we are anticipating an auction price in the region of a high six-figure sum,” Mr. van der Weff said.

Ironically, however, the long-dead dodo bird has come to symbolize humans' potential to negatively affect their environment. 

The Dutch East India Company discovered the well-padded bird on the island of Mauritius in 1598, and were easily hunted for food. As more and more European ships arrived, so did dogs, cats, rats, and monkeys, all of which preyed on the birds. Within 100 years, the dodo bird was no more.

Apart from the story of its demise, the dodo is culturally remembered for its clumsiness: the 50-pound bird could neither fly nor swim. 

"Even after the last dodo made its exit, the indignities didn't stop," The Christian Science Monitor's Claire Felter wrote in 2014, when scientists took 3-D scans of the only known complete dodo skeleton. "Dodo remains were, at times, treated with little regard for preservation. In 1755, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford tossed into a fire the taxidermied version of the last dodo seen in Europe. Present-day scientists have access to a miscellany of dodo bones, but they come from nearly as many dodos." 

"Even though the dodo has this cultural stigma to it of being clumsy and an evolutionary failure destined for doom, I would say no," Leon Claessens, a paleontologist at the College of the Holy Cross who led the team, told the Monitor at the time. "This was an organism perfectly adapted to life on Mauritius, but nobody is going to survive having the ecosystem disrupted at tremendously heavy rates."

This report includes material from the Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Dodo devotees, here's your chance: Rare assembled skeleton up for auction
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0825/Dodo-devotees-here-s-your-chance-Rare-assembled-skeleton-up-for-auction
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe