A standing height of 62-65 cm seems average ( Parish 2013) I haven’t seen any length estimates but 70 cm or thereabouts should be considered about right for an average specimen. Authors of the 1600s mostly compared the Dodo to turkeys or swans, which might have helped contribute to ideas that it was heavier and taller than it was. What do we know? First of all, existing skeletal remains show that the Dodo was large. Finally, a very useful article by Rajith Dissanayake, titled ‘What did the Dodo look like?’, was published in 2004 (Dissanayake 2004) and I used it in compiling the article you’re reading now.Įnough preamble. More recently, Jolyon Parish has produced an excellent and highly comprehensive volume on all things Dodo, namely the 2013 book The Dodo and the Solitaire: a Natural History (Parish 2013) (I reviewed it for Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: you can read my review here). Errol Fuller’s books on the Dodo and extinct birds in general ( Fuller 2000, 2002) and Julian Hume’s several articles on the Dodo and other Mauritian birds (Hume 2003, 2006, Hume & Cheke 2004, Hume et al. I can still remember the excitement caused by Andrew Kitchener’s several articles of the 1990s in which Kitchener (who’d been tasked with the creation of a new reconstruction for the National Museums of Scotland) explained his use of historical sources and the cantilever strengths of Dodo limb bones in the construction of a new life-size model, shown here (Kitchener 1990, 1993a, b). There’s one more thing to say on sources, and that’s that there are a few especially useful modern works very relevant to the subject of this article. For these reasons it (and other ‘Savery Dodos’) can’t and shouldn’t be taken as providing especially important insights into Dodo appearance or anatomy. Savery’s 1626 painting was produced from life, it doesn’t match other images which more certainly were and it seems likely that it was based on taxiderm specimens or written accounts. Regardless, all of these ‘Savery’ Dodo paintings show grey (though read on), chunky, exceedingly bulky, short-legged birds with yellowish wing and tail plumes.ĭespite claims that R. A second very famous Savery Dodo painting – this time by Roelandt’s nephew, Jan or Hans Savery – is on show at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and might have been produced in 1631. Incidentally, we’re not completely sure that Savery really was the creator of this painting but I will – from hereon – assume that he was for the sake of convenience. Supposedly based on a live bird kept in Holland, it’s today at the Natural History Museum, London ( Fuller 2002, Parish 2013). By far the most famous and influential of these are the paintings attributed to Roelandt Savery, in particular the giant 1626 painting which once belonged to writer and artist George Edwards.
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