The last fogy sighting was reported in 1662 , and in 1680 , the fowl was adjudge officially extinct . To add insult to accidental injury , our delineation of dodos as strange , awkwardly - shaped wench may not even precise — the skeleton in most museum aremade ofbones scavenged from different doll , so it ’s unmanageable to know how close we get with our modern - solar day agency .
Because the dodo was extinct before cameras were invented , we can only trust on painting and illustrations to help inform our current understanding of the flightless doll . Today , some researchers believe the traditional limning of the dodo may have been a product of aesthetic permission , because its underframe could n’t have supported such weightiness . In fact , some of the earlier effigy of the dodo , dating back to 1598,showa much thinner , almost athletic bird .
Despite all of the shoddy selective information out there , there isonething about dodos we ’re certain we know : what its header looked like . And that ’s because the Oxford University Museum of Natural History has the world ’s only subdued - tissue paper fogey specimen in existence .
Frisbii viaWikimedia Commons//CC BY - SA 3.0
It ’s believe the mummified promontory came from a fogey once displayed in London as a public attractiveness . When she died , she was stuffed and given to John Tradescant Sr . , a naturalist who accumulate interesting specimen . When Tradescant passed away in 1662 , his aggregation went to his champion Elias Ashmole , who relocate it to the now - noted Ashmolean Museum at Oxford . unhappily , the taxidermied fossil wasneglected . By 1755 , the museum discovered that mites and other bugs had destroyed everything but the dodo ’s head and one groundwork . The repose of the body was burned , lost forever to the annals of history .
The corpse are typicallyonly availablefor inquiry ; for representative , scientists conducted desoxyribonucleic acid tryout on the human foot several year ago and learn the fogy ’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon . Unless you ’re a credentialed scientist or researcher , the stuffy you ’ll plausibly be able-bodied to get is the replica of the corpse on presentation at the Ashmolean . Still , being in the same edifice as a literal fogy is closer than most hoi polloi have gotten in the past 350 years .
