S6E4: The Oxford Dodo - Science, Myth, and a Fragmented Afterlife

In this episode Rosa focuses on the Oxford Dodo, attempting to trace the life history of a bird whose only trace is a fragile head and foot in the Oxford University of Natural History. She unpacks some of the competing routes the bird might have taken – from being hunted and shipped from Mauritius to being kept in an urban menagerie. She also follows the afterlife of the museum object itself once again raising questions about the interconnections between power, possession, and knowledge. 

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Oxford University Natural History Museum
• Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
• The Tradescants
• Murder most fowl: Oxford dodo 'shot in the back of the head'

 Credits:

• Recorded: 16 January 2024
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Alice in wonderland Soundtrack, Epidemic Sound, Pixabay
• Learn more about the team here. 

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Transcript

Setting The Stage: The Oxford Dodo

Speaker 0:01

This is another iROAR podcast.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:13

Welcome back to season six of the animal highlights, where we're focused in on animals and museum collections and objects. In today's episode, we're speaking about a pretty famous uh object in Scare Quotes that you can find in Oxford, and that's the Oxford Dodo. Prior to hearing this episode, I had no idea that the Oxford Dodo was such a famous object again in Scare Quotes. And in this episode, Rosa tries to think about the animal behind the object. Rosa, welcome back to the animal highlight. I'm very much enjoying learning about some of these museum artifacts and objects and the ways in which they tell us about uh stories about animals. And so there are animal lives and stories behind these objects, which has been really, really interesting learning from you. Uh so who are we talking about today? Or what are we talking about today?

Rosa Dyer 1:10

So today we're taking a little bit of, I mean, we're still in the kind of realm of museums, we're in the realm of birds, which you know, I hope people aren't getting bored of yet. But I hope we've justified that there are lots of different interesting stories with museums and birds so far. But I think that this one will be really fun because there's a bit of a kind of element of murder mystery about it, which I hope we'll enjoy. But yeah, the jumping off point for this one is a bit different. So so far I've been kind of talking about what I've said as animal objects. And most of the time we've been talking on a species level. So, you know, we've talked about the parrots and the dark frogs, we've talked about hummingbirds, we've talked about the huya. Um, but I've always been a bit conscious when thinking about these objects, and it's been, you know, an ongoing tension in my PhD as well, is that when you're talking about things on a species level, it's quite easy to lose track of the individual, the kind of individual animal who is part of that. So, in a kind of effort to try and mitigate that a bit in this series, I thought we'd try and do our real, you know, our real best today to focus on one single animal, which is one really famous specimen, which is not at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, but is in the museum next door, which is the Oxford Animal Oxford Natural History Museum, um, which is the Oxford dodo.

From Species To One Individual

Claudia Hirtenfelder 2:20

Oh, fascinating. And of course the dodo is quite, I mean, the dodo of the species is quite famous. Um, but yeah, I really appreciate what you're saying here, the tension between individuals and um and groups. I think it's contemporary, it's a an issue. But I think in particular when historians try to write, we do this slippage into speaking at a species level and somehow imagining that one individual's experience can speak for for all. So yes, take it away, take it away.

Rosa Dyer 2:47

So the Oxford dodo is pretty emblematic of Oxford. I don't know if you've ever been there, but he's pretty he's everywhere. You see his little logo on lots of things. Um, and I think when we think of the dodo, we have a real kind of maybe Alice in Wonderland image of what he is. And I actually the Oxford dodo, I think the um Lewis Carroll dodo is based on this Oxford dodo.

Speaker 3:08

What if I should fall right through the centre? And come out the other side where people walk upside down. Oh, but that's silly. Nobody Oh magic! Imagine dodo in my house, dodo.

Why The Dodo Became An Icon

Rosa Dyer 3:25

And he's a really I'm saying he, I think we're going to maybe be a bit vague about he or she or because I don't want to say it, I think it's quite important that we kind of personalize it. But so I'm going to say he or maybe I'll try and do them as well, but we don't know whether it's a male or female specimen. That's something um I'll talk about a bit later about what the limits of the specimen is. But he's really famous, even though actually the specimen itself only consists of a mummified foot and um the head of the dodo. He's one of the very few surviving dodo specimens in existence, I think one of 26, and the only one which includes soft tissue materials. So the other ones I think are only skeletal. And so he holds a really unique value for scientific study of the species for things like DNL, DNA analysis in particular. So today, if you're going to visit him in the museum, you're only going to see a head, a cast of the head and foot. So the actual specimen itself is off display and kind of kept safely in storage. But despite its fragmentary nature, I think it continues to be one of the defining specimens for the museum itself. All of their social media is centred around him. It's all called more than a dodo, is the kind of tagline of the museum. And he's seen as sort of a mascot for Oxford in a lot of ways. He's presented in gargoyles on the Oxford's largest library, the Bodleian. And he's perhaps, I think, most famously depicted in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. So he exists kind of in a really important scientific sphere as one of these few remaining specimens, but also in the cultural sphere of, you know, emblematic of Oxford as an important part of the museum. And so I found it a really interesting kind of case study for trying to trace, okay, you know, if we're thinking about animals in the archive and animal biographies, surely this sort of celebrity specimen should be the easiest individual to trace of any. He's not, you know, some anonymous bird as part of a kind of huge assemblage of a feather headdress like what we were talking about last week. He has kind of, as an individual, quite a famous, you know, legacy and position within kind of Oxford culture. So I sort of gave it as a challenge to myself to try and see if we could trace his life and then his afterlife in the museum. I think everyone's probably familiar with the dodo, really. And I didn't really want to spend so much time talking about, you know, the history of extinction and what the whole scenario around the dodas as a species was. Because A, I think it's probably already been covered, I'm sure, on the podcast.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:45

No, the dodo has, I mean, maybe I should test my own knowledge here, but if I'm not mistaken, the dodo was the species. I mean, it was kind of a really interesting example of how scientists and researchers and museum curators ended up going on a like a hunt to try and get the last because they were dying and ended up kind of killing the species that they were trying to celebrate in their own um artifacts and and uh collections. And the last one was killed for a collection. Is that is that correct? This is a very like vague, I don't know.

Tracing A Life From Sparse Clues

Rosa Dyer 6:20

Yeah, I mean, to give kind of, you know, a kind of pop pop 30 seconds of what the kind of extinction of the Doda was. So they were they were native to the island of Mauritius in the 17th century, and I think they hold a really tragic record for having one of the shortest periods between their scientific discovery and their extinction. So they're first documented in 1598 by Dutch explorers, and then I think the last living sighting was like only a few decades later, in like 1662, I think, is the last recorded sighting. So a really short kind of existence in science. Um, I think certainly there was a component of collecting and of yeah, this kind of frenzy that we also saw with the Huya in our in our previous episode. But they also think that the decline was um due to other factors as well. So things like the introduction of the rats and cats and dogs to the island probably also contributed to their decline. They would have been predated by new species. So yeah, they're often, I think, framed as sort of the poster child of human-induced extinction. And I think there's something quite, you know, appealing to our hearts about this ungainly, flightless bird that, you know, was only in his scientific existence for such a short period until we came along and kind of destroyed their probably quite happy existence. So it's within this narrative that I suppose we kind of have to think about when we try and trace the Oxford dodo. So he exists, you know, in this very short time frame, I suppose, but then has since then existed in the Oxford Natural History Museum up till today. So actually his life is probably almost is definitely a lot shorter than his afterlife. So I thought we'd kind of try and trace his biography. So I've done my best to kind of think about what his life could have been. And a lot of people have tried to do this. I will say, oh, this is not original thought at all. I'm very much kind of taking from other people's studies, which I'll link in the blog post. So we don't have any definitive records of what the Oxford dodo's life was. You know, we don't know whether he was specifically hunted or what how he kind of got to Oxford, but I think there are some kind of very intriguing and tantalising clues about it. So, although he's now housed in the Oxford Natural History Museum, he's originally part of the Trident Collection, which is kind of the founding collection of a lot of the Oxford museums. And their original location was located in London in Vauxhall, so not um not in Oxford, that was moved later. And the this specimen can be found in the original catalogue of the Tradescent Collection in 1656, the catalogue itself, which is listed as Dodar from the Aynod Mauritius, it not being able to fly so big, which I think is so sweet. So it's been suggested by researchers that this is probably referring to the Oxford specimen, um, although we can't really closely link the trace to it. And so I guess my first question is okay, well, how have we got here? How is this dead dodo, you know, he's dead in the Tridescent collection, got here? Was he collected in Mauritius dead and then brought as a specimen? Or is there a possibility that he was living in London and then died in London and then became part of the collection? And which might seem like a bit of a crazy thought, but actually it is one of the kind of leading theories about what could have happened to him. So there are bizarrely I don't think it's crazy at all.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 9:32

Because weren't there loads of menageries at this time as well, right? Like there were lots of traveling menageries, lots of kind of exotic animals being put on display, particularly in cities. So Yeah, I suppose yeah, that seems plausible to me.

Menageries, Trade, And A London Sighting

Rosa Dyer 9:44

That does like to me, in one sense, that really makes sense. But then also, I mean, I think I'm maybe also in the mindset of um when we were talking about the hummingbirds and how difficult they were to transport from South America to the UK and how they, you know, there were never any live specimens. And obviously, I think dodos are probably much more robust than the hummingbirds. But to me, the thought of the kind of transport of it already always made it seem much less likely. But you know, I think the menagerie is probably there there definitely were records of them. And there are a few records of live dodos being being transported to Europe. The main significant record um is described by a a politician called Sir uh Sir Hammond Lestrange, um, who recounts an experience he had in 1638 of seeing a live dodo in London as part of one of these menagerie exhibits. So he describes entering a house in London, having seen an advertisement from outside, and then viewing a large bird, which was described by the keeper as a dodo. So we don't know specifically whether, you know, it could have it could have been any bird, really. We're not sure if it definitely was. But given the timing of the description and also the shared London context of both the Trudescent collection and this dodo, some people have posited that it could have been um the Oxford dodo, so that he could have been living this kind of circus life and then dies vaguely sometimes between uh 1638 and 1656 when the um Trudescent catalogue is written, and then enters the catalogue as a dead specimen.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 11:07

Well, that's really interesting. Super, super interesting.

CT Scans Reveal A Shooting

Rosa Dyer 11:10

It's one of those things where it kind of sounds slightly too good to be true to me, like you're kind of, you know, you're wanting to I mean, it's lovely to think about the life of him as a circus specimen in some way, and then this kind of vague death. Um, I'm not sure how much there is actual evidence for blinking, um, that there's no evidence, I don't think, of um, or sorry, documentation of how the Tridescent collection procured the dodo. So it is possible it could have been him. And actually, reading the Tridescent collection, it sounds like it is a whole specimen at that point. So um this kind of head and foot isn't what the original um kind of collection specimen would have been. It was likely a whole, a whole bird skin or body um when it came in. So it is possible. Um and up until very recently, there wasn't much to kind of add or take away from this as a theory. You know, it was just one of many theories about how it could have come. But interestingly, um, so very recently, um, in I think 2018, researchers at the University of Warwick undertook um CT scans of the dodo's head and foot. Um so the surviving kind of aspect of the specimen. And what they found was that the dodo had been shot in the head. What? And so um so it'd been shot um with what looked like kind of hunting pellets. So uh so that kind of points to, okay, well, if you've got a prized kind of circus specimen, are you shooting that in the back of the head? Possibly not. So they couldn't tell whether it would have been a kill shot to the animal, like they don't have the rest of the body to do that. But to me, this kind of pointed the needle away from, you know, bougie dodo living life of fame in circus in London and then dying of natural causes and joining the collection. It sounds slightly more like it was killed in Mauritius and then its body somehow made it back to Britain relatively intact. But of course, that doesn't really equate to how um the body would have prints what would have been preserved moving from Mauritius to Oxford uh to London.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 13:05

So there are a lot of questions.

Rosa Dyer 13:06

I mean, I think both to speculate.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 13:08

Both theories probably hold true in some way with regards to how animals were being bought and traded. And I think just opening those possibilities is important because there were certainly loads of animals. I mean, whether we were talking about tigers, bears, beavers, you know, birds that were being killed in colonies and then shipped back, right, for various reasons, whether it was for plumage or for um display or even just to be stuffed. And um so that was definitely happening, but there were also live animals. And I think a lot of animals would have been captured live and also died en route, right? And then moved. I think there were all of these different like lives and afterlives happening with this kind of exchange of um quote-unquote exotic animals, right? Completely.

Rosa Dyer 13:52

And I think, you know, we're never really going to get a full answer to it. But I think as you say, yeah, thinking about all these possibilities is what's really interesting. And from a kind of, you know, meta-level, the thing I also found really interesting when looking through kind of back through the media that surrounded this in 2018. So, you know, they brought out a statement saying we've discovered that the Oxford dodo was shot, is that there was this real kind of shock about it being, you know, who murdered the dodo, who killed the Oxford dodo. And to me, I mean, obviously that's, you know, what the kind of sensationalist media and kind of heading is going to be. But also I was struck by how unremarkable that ending to a dodo is that, like, you know, the fact that a an animal or a museum specimen is going to have ended its museum life as the result of an encounter with a hunter's gun is kind of the most obvious and most, I think, normal way that most animals do enter the museum place is through kind of human-induced dying, basically. So yeah, I was very struck by that. This idea of suddenly this narrative of um who killed the dodo coming in was quite sweet and kind of showed the the importance of the dodo to to Oxford and you know how it really captures the imagination of people as a museum specimen.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 15:02

And also kind of the disconnect between how things die, right? Like when where do you how do you think the things that end up in museums get there, right? Like we we do have this way of kind of obfuscating the the story of how the object or the artifact got there, right?

Rethinking Collection And Death

Rosa Dyer 15:18

Completely. And like, why is this a murder mystery, whereas, you know, every other, every other thing is, you know, we don't really care about or are that curious about it's but yeah, so I suppose that kind of covers what we know about the Oxford dodo's life. And I I don't know how uh you could maybe scold me on this. I don't know whether we have really maintained its individual biography or not. I think we've, as you say, got lots of individual interesting threads of possibility that we can maybe weave into a story, which you know is what a lot of working with specimens and understanding museum museum objects is and what biography is, is often weaving these things. But I'm not sure we can really fully say this is the individual life of this bird.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 15:58

Yeah, there's um, I mean, I I find this really fascinating and interesting because there's the sense that the dodo is somehow, this particular dodo, the Oxford dodo, is famous. Um, but there are also tons of specimens and birds and animals who are not famous and right, like, and just because you're not famous and we can't trace those personal stories, does that mean you don't have a history to tell? And of course you do, right? No, completely.

Rosa Dyer 16:22

And I think you also um this kind of relationship between the individual and the species, particularly a species, an extinct species like the dodo, is a really interesting one where, you know, he still can be a real ambassador for for representing our understandings of extinction and plays a really important part in the museum. And that's doesn't, you know, the fact that the individual life of the bird can't fully be explored doesn't really detract from that kind of cultural importance or scientific importance that it has. It's um kind of represented well by the fact that the specimen is now just a head and a foot. It's not as if you go in and can, you know, fully imagine or see what the whole dodo is like. It's all based on this quite kind of small and very um, you know, diminutive, diminutive piece of material.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:12

You said when the specimen first entered the first collection, there was a whole body, but now it's only the head and the foot. How did how did we get here?

Decay, Rumours, And What Remains

Rosa Dyer 17:21

So we're not really sure. I mean, that's kind of one of the really interesting details of its kind of afterlife biography. So for a long time it was thought that um kind of inexperienced curators had tried to get rid of pests on the specimen by setting it on fire, and that had resulted in it just being a head and a foot. I think we can probably give credit to those previous curators that I think that is probably just a rumour and it has kind of been debunked by the museum. So I think probably the truth is much more of a kind of pedestrian one, which is that, you know, organic materials don't last forever, and the process of decay, even in a space like the museum, which we think of, you know, this preserving space, you know, a lot of our justification for having museums is that they're protective of sort of objects. They're supposed to, you know, stop things like decay happening. But actually that's really difficult. And that probably in the 300 years since that Tridescent collection, um, since it's been in the Natural History Museum, sorry, um, you know, those processes just do occur and you know, the kind of biological materials have suffered from that. So it has the body hasn't really been spared as a result of its guardianship within the museum. And I think, you know, that is something that is a part of the life of an object in a museum, is unfortunately decay.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 18:31

Sorry, you said it's not currently the actual object is not currently on display, right?

Replicas, Casting, And Global Reach

Rosa Dyer 18:36

No, so this is a kind of other part of its life that's really interesting, is that um so on display at the moment is a cast replica. And this idea of casting particularly important specimens is a huge part of museum display, particularly for things like dodos, where as a natural history museum, extinction is probably one of the kind of big ideas that you want to communicate to a lot of your visitors, and the dodo is really emblematic of that. But if you've only got 26 dodo specimens in the world, you know, there's not enough to go around. So casting and replicas is a way that you can distribute specimens in a way that is fairer, I suppose, and also allows for more people to interact and get an understanding with those specimens without, you know, having to jeopardize the original specimen. So, yes, at the moment in the Oxford Museum is a replica, but also replicas of the Oxford dodo have travelled all around the world. So since the 1820s, they've been distributed around the UK and also to places like um, I think one's ended up in New Zealand. So they've it's not just that the Oxford dodo is an individual specimen with an individual biography, but also it's been replicated and kind of distributed as an as an individual around the world as something that is emblematic of the species itself. So, in a way, we kind of, I think, become quite blurred about what the tracing of this individual is because it becomes distributed, it becomes both an individual and also a representative of the species, and how much the actual kind of biological material is important. I think we can go back and forth on that because you know, we've just had these recent studies in 2018 that have given us more information based on um these CT scans and DNA analysis. So we are still getting more information about, you know, the life of the dodo and um, you know, more contributions to science, but also as a replica, I think it's doing a lot of work of teaching about extinction in loads of museums beyond what the individual kind of actual material is. So I think it's really interesting. And I think I sort of ended up thinking about animal animal biography in quite a different way, um, having having done the research for this episode. Both thinking about, I think, processes of decay and museums as spaces where we think, okay, once they're in the museum, the object stays in stasis, and that's not the case. The afterlife of the dodo has changed a lot since it first entered the museum. But also that it wasn't uh the the kind of influence and importance of the individual specimen is one that isn't just situated in where the actual kind of single specimen exists, but through casting, through the replication, through its representative, as both, you know, Lewis Carroll and the um gargoyles on the library and all of its kind of representations as, you know, the Oxford dodo culturally and also how it's extended to all these museums around the world. I think individual is maybe a bit of a problematic way to think about it, but it is this very distributed being that has had a huge influence in lots of places. And tracing that, I think, is a lot more interesting to think of it in a distributed and kind of multifaceted way than focusing on a linear biography.

Individual Vs Species Representation

Claudia Hirtenfelder 21:39

Super, uh, super, super interesting. I mean, I think there is, I think both are interesting and important to do. I think there is something to say about trying, like you've done in this episode, to unpack, uh, even if it's incomplete and it's partial, to get a sense of who the individuals are behind um the artifacts. Because sometimes we conflate individuals. Or we blend them, as is the case of the representations of the Oxford dodo, right? Like we tend to blend kind of the experiences of species as somehow being one and the same. Um, but you know, this one was shot, another one might have experienced something else. And every experience we hear about w gives us a fuller comprehension and understanding of what that time might have been like for dodos generally. Um, and yeah, I think, I mean, I imagine historians even working with humans struggle with this as you don't want to just speak about, you know, the poor as the poor as the poor, because the ways in which you could be poor historically were quite distinct and different from one another. Yeah, I hear you that there's a lot more going on here than just the individual's story and just their historical story, right? There's there's this constant re-representation, almost a meme, right? That the dodo has become a kind of meme for speaking about extinction. And when you said that, the polar bear came to mind for me uh as well, is this kind of who, of course, is an animal who exists right now. There are individuals that exist right now who are undergoing extinction events or undergoing kind of uh dying or dying off and having a loss of habitat. But somehow even the individuals who currently exist kind of sometimes get blurred behind the narrative or the representation of them as the symbol for climate change, right? So there's the work they do as representative representatives, but there's also the actual individuals who are experiencing the hunger and the removal of habitat, right? And and I think we need to somehow respect that there are also individuals behind those narratives, if you know what I mean.

Rosa Dyer 23:38

Yeah, I totally agree. And maybe we'll talk about this in an upcoming episode, but it really reminds me of, you know, this weighing up of how we think of conservation. And for something like zoos, for example, when you think about living collections, is okay, these are representatives of a species, and people coming to the zoo or the museum to see these animals brings in money, which is supposedly going to conservation efforts. But yeah, where do you draw that line between the individual experience of, as you say, the individual polar bear, the individual um whoever, versus yeah, the continued existence of that species in a more broad way? I think, yeah, this is probably quite a central conversation to thinking about how we do animal studies and how we think about yeah, kind of anthropocenic uh influences on on animal futures, probably.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 24:26

Well, thank you once again, Rosa. Really fascinating conversation um and and talk about the dodo. Do you know any like uh aspects about the dodo's social life or anything? Like, do we know anything about the dodo's?

Symbols, Memes, And Modern Parallels

Rosa Dyer 24:38

I'm not sure, you know. And I think this this could very well just be my uh a blind spot in my research. So I don't want to say we don't know about it. Um I think because they were around for so little of a time and a lot of them are coming from very old historical records, it's quite, you know, as ever when we talk about this, it's often about trying to find presence when there's absence in terms of the historical record of just picking out these little points where they come up. Um so I don't know how much that there were really um in-depth studies on them. Um I'll have to look up and if I find anything, I'll I'll add it to the blog post. But no, I didn't really I didn't really come across much about what their actual lived lives were in Mauritius. But yeah, no, that's a really interesting question to think about.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 25:19

Super. Well, um thank you so much. I've I've learned so much in this this episode. Uh I didn't know about the Oxford Dodo, even though they are representative and famous. Somehow I hadn't made the connection that this was a specific dodo. So thank you, thank you so much. Um have a have a wonderful day. Thank you, Rosa Dye, for co-hosting this Animal Highlight with me. Thank you also to Rebecca Shen for doing the episode artwork and the Animal Highlight logo, and thank you to Gordon Clark for composing and doing the bad music. Other sound effects in this episode came from the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack, epidemic sound, and Pixabay. This episode was produced by myself. This is The Animal Highlight with me, Claudia Hirtenfelder.

Speaker 26:27

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