The Summers Place Dodo - 22nd Nov., 2016

The Summers Place Dodo November 22nd 2016

A unique opportunity to purchase one of the most complete skeletons of a dodo.

Believed to be the first to be sold publicly since 1914.

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Since first working with the renowned expert Errol Fuller in 2013 we have had great fun and not inconsiderable success with the evolution sales series. We have sold dinosaurs, a woolly mammoth, amazing fossils and great works of taxidermy but never in our wildest dreams did we think we would be offering one of the most iconic of all extinct species, a Dodo.

The skeleton has been painstakingly pieced together over the last 40 years, bone by bone, from auction houses, dealers and collectors. It was completed quite a few years ago and the vendor has reluctantly decided to now sell it.

It is believed this is the first complete skeleton to be offered at auction and the first skeleton to be available since 1914 when Rowland Ward sold a similar but less complete composite skeleton to Cardiff Museum. The price is thought to have been ÂŁ350 at a time when Britain was still on the gold standard. With the price of gold today that would be roughly $6,500,000 or nearly ÂŁ5,000,000!

Errol has kindly written the introduction to the dodo and allowed us to use several of his images from his previous publications on the dodo. As one of the world's leading experts on the dodo a more fitting writer would be difficult to imagine.

There is a bone map on the last page of the catalogue, and a comprehensive list of bones is currently being prepared. Also on that page is a description of several of the world's most notable composite specimens. There is only one skeleton that comes from a single individual animal, and fittingly it is on Mauritius.

The skeleton is being offered as part of the November 22nd Evolution sale and will be on public display beforehand at Summers Place Auctions. Private viewings can be arranged in advance.

Rupert van der Werff Director Summers Place Auctions rupert.werff@summersplaceauctions.com

A dodo painted by Cornelius Saftleven, circa 1638. Perhaps the only surviving picture produced using a living bird as a model; the others were probably painted using stuffed birds as a reference.

Sale November 22nd

Front cover illustration

Summers Place Auctions

The front cover of The Dodo and its Kindred by Strickland & Melville,

The Walled Garden Billingshurst West Sussex RH14 9AB info@summersplaceauctions.com www.summersplaceauctions.com +44 (0) 1403 331331

London 1848 Back cover illustration The frontispiece of The Dodo and its Kindred by Strickland & Melville, London 1848

ere omeOpinred. he much ter hard they bly

Part of the Dutch Fleet on its return to Holland, 1599, by Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom

Introduction to the dodo by Errol Fuller During the month of September in the year 1598 a flotilla of ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company drew close to a mysterious island far out in the Indian Ocean. As far as anyone knows, no human had ever set eyes on this island before, let alone set foot on it. The ships were under the command of Vice-Admiral Wybrandt van Warwijk and after a short period of investigation he ordered his little fleet to sail into a

natural harbour that his navigators had noticed.

With a mixture of excitement and natural wariness the sailors came ashore and found themselves in a land of reptiles and birds; the only mammals were those that could fly there – bats – or those that could swim – seals.

Birds were everywhere but one kind in particular stood out – a large fat creature equipped with an enormous beak. The

The head of a dodo drawn on Mauritius by an anonymous artist in 1601

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Dancing Dodos by Roelandt Savery, circa 1626 sailors saw many of them, and so man’s relationship with the dodo began.

This relationship didn’t begin well. Sailors who had been many weeks at sea did what sailors of the time invariably did – they caught some of these large and tempting birds, and ate them. The catching was comparatively easy because these heavy birds – about the size of a large turkey – had one great advantage – for the sailors that is, not for themselves.

They lacked the ability to fly!

Whether or not they were actually good to eat is something of a moot point. Opinions seem to have differed. But it is

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unlikely that the ordinary sailors cared much for culinary niceties. After weeks at sea feeding on hard biscuits and any scraps they could get, dodos probably seemed delicious.

And matters were going to get worse for the dodo.

Once knowledge of the existence of the island (the island that we now call Mauritius) became common knowledge, men came at regular intervals. First the Dutch came again, and during 1601 the very first clear drawing of a dodo’s head was made. This picture was drawn on Mauritius by an anonymous artist who was clearly using a recently dead dodo as a model. Soon after the

A stuffed dodo in the collection of Emperor Rudolph II, probably painted by Jacob Hoefnagel, circa 1602 Dutch, the English came and then the French.

Nor was it just humans who brought doom for dodos. With the men and women came dogs, cats, monkeys, pigs and rats and these creatures preyed rapaciously on the birds and their eggs.

produced by a Dutch artist called Roelandt Savery, and a few written descriptions. The most evocative of these was written by an English visitor to Mauritius named Thomas Herbert.

At sometime during 1626 he wrote:

By the year 1680 (perhaps even earlier) the dodo was gone. All that was left were one or two poorly stuffed examples, a series of paintings most of them

Here and here only is generated the Dodo, which for shape and rareness may antagonize the Phoenix of Arabia: her body is round and fat, few weigh less than 50 pounds…her visage darts

Thomas Herbert’s drawing of a dodo, circa 1626 forth melancholy, as sensible of nature’s injurie in framing so great a body, to be guided with complementall wings, so small and impotent that they serve only to prove her bird. The half of her head is naked seeming covered with a fine veil, her bill is crooked downwards…her eyes are small and like to diamonds, round and rowling, her clothing downy feathers, her train three small plumes… her appetite strong and greedy.

The Dodo is reputed more for wonder than for food; greasie stomaches may seek after them, but to the delicate they are offensive and of no nourishment.

Although he could write

beautifully, Herbert’s drawing skills were no match for his literary ones!

During the early years of human interaction with dodos it seems that some birds were actually kept alive and were taken to Holland and further afield in Europe – and even to India. In these places either their stuffed remains or perhaps the living birds themselves were painted by European artists. Although most of these pictures were painted by Roelandt Savery, his images seem to be portraits of stuffed birds. Perhaps the only image that can definitely be said to have been painted using an

The Dodo by Roelandt Savery, circa 1626 actual living bird for a model was produced by a Dutch painter named Cornelius Saftleven around the year 1638.

Unfortunately Saftleven’s picture shows only the bird’s head, but it does provide reasonably convincing evidence that there was a living dodo in Holland during the late 1630s.

So, less than 100 years after its discovery, the dodo passed into history and the next event in its posthumous story came in 1755. Somehow – and we don’t know quite how or why – a crudely stuffed dodo had arrived in Oxford in the middle of the 17th century. We do know that it had once belonged to Charles I’s The preserved head of the Oxford dodo as it looks now

Drawn by Catherine Wallis

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John Tenniel’s illustration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland published in 1865 be deposited.

A dodo with other birds in the menagerie of the Mogul Emperor Jahangir, painted by Ustad Mansur, circa 1625 gardener John Tradescant, but it had become part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum. And there it languished for 100 years or so.

Then in January of 1755 the trustees of the museum made their

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annual inspection of the museum’s stock. Statute 8 of the museum’s charter read: That as any particular grows old and perishing the Keeper may remove it into one of the closets or other repository; and some other to

It is easy to imagine the state that the stuffed dodo was in. At the time it was preserved, taxidermy was very much in its infancy and only the most unsophisticated methods would have been used.

More than 100 years after its preparation the specimen would have been in a shocking state.

Insects had doubtless attacked it, feathers would have been falling off and crumbling in great clusters of ruin, and anything that

the insects couldn’t do, dirt and dust would have achieved.

In the circumstances, the trustees were in no doubt. The specimen should be taken out and destroyed. ‘Some other to be deposited’ was an impossible expectation.

As far as is known, by this date there was no other anywhere in the world.

In any case, the dodo was taken out and destroyed. We don’t know whether it was burned or just dumped, and there is a certain amount of

The Mare aux Songes photographed during 2000 useless modern debate about what exactly happened. It doesn’t matter – it was destroyed. But what does matter is a twist to the tale. On the way to the fire or the dump, someone – and again we don’t know who – decided that the action was too wasteful so he (or she) cut off the head and one of the feet and returned these to the museum.

century or so, and during this time the dodo became something of a footnote in the tale of natural history. Some naturalists even began to deny that it had ever existed. The paintings, they said, were simply figments of artistic imagination, and similarly the literary descriptions.

The only tangible evidence of the dodo’s former existence (the head in Oxford) was largely forgotten.

And there these relics remained for another

Then, during the 1860s two entirely unconnected events occurred which

launched the dodo to international superstardom.

The first of these was the publication of Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll had been in the habit of taking the little girl who he immortalized as Alice in city walks around Oxford, and one of their favourite trips was to visit the dodo head in the Ashmolean Museum. When he

finally wrote his book he included an imaginery dodo together with a memorable illustration

by John Tenniel that was based upon one of the pictures painted more than 200 years previously by Roelandt Savery. The book and the picture rocketed the dodo to instant fame.

And then there came an extraordinary coincidence.

At the same time as the publication of the book, a

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A Steven’s Auction catalogue together with the company’s promotional material great collection of bones arrived in London – all of them dodo bones! These had been found in a marsh on Mauritius and the story of their finding was fascinating.

A Mauritius schoolmaster by the name of Charles Clarke became interested in the possibility of finding bones in a swampy area that the locals named the Mare aux Songes. This area is 4 or 5 acres in extent and is close to what is now the Mauritius airport.

Some have claimed it lies under the airport’s tarmac but this is by no means the truth. It still exists.

Anyway Mr. Clarke has 6

left an account of what happened way back in 1865:

feet, they met with an entire tibia and I was eventually rewarded by finding

I have been nearly 30 years a resident in Mauritius and the hope of finding some remains of the extinct bird that once inhabited this island led me to make many inquiries and researches, alike fruitless.

the bones of many dodos.

After many years of expectation I had given up my efforts in despair. In September last, some of my scholars informed me that a number of bones had been turned up in a marsh…. I resolved on sending some men into the centre where the water was about 3 feet deep and there by feeling in the mud with their naked

It should perhaps be said that the people who did the actual searching were poor labourers whose normal occupation was working in the sugar plantations – plantations that still exist on the island.

Many of the bones were immediately sent to museums in London, Cambridge and Paris. Richard Owen, the first superintendant of

Londons Natural History Museum, was immediately able to assemble an almost complete skeleton from some of these bones. But Mr. Clarke, having provided museums with bones, was opportunistic enough to realize that he had a collection with considerable commercial potential. So having sent a great many of his bones to institutional collections he also sent numbers to a London auction house that was then famous for its natural history sales – Stevens Auction Rooms of Covent Garden. A very few reasonably complete skeletons have, over the

Two lithographs showing some of the bones sent to Richard Owen, and the skeleton he was able to put together years, been assembled from these bones.

From this time onwards the dodo’s rise to become one of the great icons of extinction was unstoppable. Only Tyrannosaurus, or perhaps one of the long-necked dinosaurs, can match it for celebrity, and expressions like ‘dead as a dodo’ have become part of the English language.

Today we know that despite their extraordinary shape – and strange as it may seem – dodos were actually greatly modified pigeons.

Eons before the arrival of the Dutch, a flock of

tropical pigeons chanced upon the island we call Mauritius. Whether they were lost, wind blown or just searching for a new home we have no way of knowing. They landed on the island, probably exhausted and relieved to have found land, and there they found a paradise for birds, with no mammals to hunt them and with abundant food.

So they stayed, and over eons adapted to their new environment. They got bigger and fatter. With no need to fly to escape from predators or to find new sources of food, they took to the air only rarely.

Eventually, they stopped flying altogether. Over

generations their wings began to atrophy and their bodies got much bigger until they no longer resembled – even remotely – the ancestral flock that had originally landed on the island. And there came a time when such was their enormous size and the small size of what was left of their wings that they couldn’t have flown even had they wanted to. And this was their state at the time of the arrival of the Dutch fleet.

Yet despite the fact that scientists have been able to determine this, we know almost nothing about the living dodo. The few written

records from the 17th century are somewhat contradictory in the information they provide, but so too are the paintings that were produced while dodos still lived. Unfortunately we are not sure how accurate these images are Was the dodo as fat as many of the portraits suggest or was it a rather slimmer creature?

Athough there has been much modern debate over this matter, the truth is that we don’t really know whether living dodos were just moderately plump or truly obese.

Nor do we know their exact colour. Were they 7

The frontispiece to Owen’s Memoir on the Dodo

A group of privately owned dodo bones - but nowhere enough to make up a skeleton!

brown, grey, or dirty white? We just don’t know. Some pictures show the birds brownish, some grey, some even white.

serious scientists – have just made things up. Their beliefs and wild theories have been written down as if they are proven facts, and then these theories are blindly copied by others who take them at face value.

And just what are the peculiar tail feathers that some pictures show Are they just a figment of artistic imagination?

Then there is the enormous beak. What

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was it used for? All sorts of suggestions have been made, but there is no real evidence for any of them.

Over the years millions and millions of words have been written about the dodo. But because so little is known in terms of actual facts, writers – even some of those who imagine themselves to be

So beware. Much of what is written about the dodo

is as much a work of the imagination as Alice’s Adventures.

The Summers Place Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)

an extremely rare and important dodo skeleton 16th century and earlier Mauritius 61cm.; 24ins high Composed from bones originally sold at Stevens Auction Rooms in the 19th century and assembled over the last 40 years.

Estimate upon request.

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us and small wing bones, some vertebrae, ribs, phalanges cast.

Bone map of the Summers Place Dodo

This skeleton was purchased from Rowland Ward in 1914 who had in turn obtained it from the French firm Les Fils d’Emile Deyrolle in Paris.

The areas highlighted in red are restorations modelled in clay. The cranium is fragmentary and has been consolidated with clay.

Europe Paris Skull fragmentary, lacking quadrates and jugal bones.

Sternum incomplete; some ribs and claws cast.

Lyon Skull fragmentary. Vertebrae missing; ribs and some wing bones cast.

Stuttgart Cranium, ribs and toes cast

USA

The following list details the best composite skeletons in the world as a reference to the completness of this skeleton

UK Oxford Head completely cast, plus wing, pelvis, smaller bones

London Cranium fragmentary and missing quadrates and jugal bones. Some of the ribs and some of the claws cast

Tring Much of the skull, quadrates, ribs, carpometacar-

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pus and phalanges of the wing cast

Cambridge Cranium and rostrum (upper beak tip) fragmentary. Missing toes and other missing parts were added from the Thirioux collection.

Cardiff Cranium fragmentary, lacking quadrates and jugals; upper jaw, humer-

Harvard Skull and upper jaw, ribs cast Note: This is the most complete specimen in the US. American Museum New York Cranium, quadrates, jugal bones, part of beak, ribs, carpometacarpus casts

Part 1 of the Craddock Collection of Natural History and Taxidermy 20th September, 2016, Part 2 to be sold in November

Comprising over 300 lots, mainly by Rowland Ward, Van Ingen and Gerrard

A magnificient Tiger’s head by Van Ingen & Van Ingen 64cm.; 24ins high £4,000/6,000

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THE WALLED GARDEN SUMMERS PLACE BILLINGSHURST WEST SUSSEX RH14 9AB +44 (0) 1403 331331

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