Digging for Dodos

Julian Hume, a British paleontologist, is one of the world’s leading authorities on the dodo, the large, flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius—five hundred miles east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean—until its extinction, at the end of the seventeenth century. I met Hume a few months ago in the southeast corner of the island, at the muddy work site of an international group of scientists looking for dodo remains; such an activity had not been seen on this scale for nearly a century. The group called itself the 2006 Mauritius Dodo Expedition. Hume, who is an easygoing man in his mid-forties, was unshaven, and as filthy as a child in a detergent commercial. He walked me around the area of the expedition’s interest: a field on the edge of a sugar estate, where an orange ditchdigger on caterpillar tracks stood silent, holding in its scoop a block of dripping, peaty-looking earth that it had extracted a short time earlier. The neat hole left by the scoop had filled with water, and a dragonfly traced the outline of this new pond in an unflagging rectangular circuit. The digger’s driver had fallen asleep in his cab while awaiting instructions. A jet took off from the international airport nearby. To one side, Hume’s colleagues grubbed through a previous scoop of mud, using water pumped by a generator. When the generator stopped for a moment, we could hear surf; the sea was only a few hundred yards away. In the other direction, a wooded slope led up to sugarcane fields, which, out of view, stretched on a flat plain for miles inland toward distant mountains.

Hume, who grew up in a working-class family on the south coast of En-gland, was a “bird and extinction freak” as a child, but he didn’t start his formal scientific studies until he was in his thirties, and he finished his Ph.D. only in 2005. (A year later, he became a grandfather.) Today, Hume holds positions at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Portsmouth, but he is also a serious amateur artist, and in his spare time he makes careful, although inevitably approximate, paintings of dodos and other extinct bird species, working with acrylic paint on paper. Three of these have been published in the journal Nature. This dual approach to the subject might not seem fully respectable to some paleontological colleagues, but Hume argues that a study of extinct animals calls for an imaginative and extrapolatory frame of mind, of a kind not always valued in research science: a readiness to see what is not there.

It was in this spirit that Hume surveyed the Mauritius site—through the eyes of a Dutch seafarer of the late sixteenth century. As we walked, he described how Dutch ships first arrived on the island in September, 1598, when a party of sailors from an eight-ship exploratory fleet—on its faltering way to what is now Indonesia—came ashore at a beach not far from where we were. (The spot is marked by a strangely forbidding gray stone obelisk.) The ships had been at sea for four months. “The Dutch were out of drinking water, they were starving,” Hume said. “And then they saw this green and tropical land. They could just plunge their hands into the water and catch a fish. There were parrots overhead—they could literally knock them out of the sky. There were giant tortoises, totally fearless.”

Mauritius, which has an area of seven hundred square miles and a population of one and a quarter million people, was then uninhabited. Unusually in the history of European adventure and plunder, here was an island attractive to an imperial power—arable, fairly big, and well placed for trade routes—that had no prehistory and no indigenous people. Its first human settlers wore trousers and took notes. (Portuguese sailors had discovered the island around ninety years earlier—and it’s likely that Arab traders had visited centuries before that—but, until the Dutch arrived, nobody had lived there. Nor had anyone written about it: the Portuguese published no maps or descriptions.) At a moment in history that is tantalizingly close to the present—centuries after the human occupation of, say, New Zealand or Madagascar—Mauritius was pristine. “If Stephen Hawking is right, and we can travel through time, then I want to be here in September, 1598, with my paints under my arm, and a big pad, and just start painting,” Hume said longingly.

Today, Mauritius is a “trashed island,” he said. “There were at least twenty-five endemic birds then. Only eight survive. Almost everything we can see now was introduced by humans.” He was referring equally to the grasses, the birds, and the trees. “Those are royal palms from Cuba,” he said, and pointed. “Those are traveller palms from Madagascar.” He went on, “If you squint, you can see what the Dutch saw when they first landed.” Squinting, we removed the trees and the sugarcane, the occasional flash of an Indian ring-necked parakeet, and ten rather dour scientists, most of them Dutch archeologists and paleontologists. We were left with little more than the green contours of the land and the blue of the sky.

On that first visit, the Dutch stayed offshore for two weeks, making a number of excursions onto the island. After the ships returned to Holland, reports and illustrations of the island’s plenitude were published, including an engraving in which a pair of sailors take a ride along a beach atop a giant tortoise. Another engraving showed the first representation of the dodo: men are dragging nets for fish, while to one side a large upright bird, apparently rolling its eyes in resentment, walks past a palm tree, looking like a chick that has grown comically huge. (A nineteenth-century naturalist commented on the “gigantic immaturity” of the species.) According to the accompanying text, the bird was as big as a swan and had “a round rump with two or three curled feathers on it.” The sailors referred to it as walghvoghel, which translates as “repulsive bird” and is thought to refer to the dodo’s taste when cooked, although Hume’s research has led him to a kinder interpretation—that the bird was considered repulsive for its indiscriminate omnivorousness. Still, according to the first reports the walghvoghel compared poorly to “other small birds”; its flesh was tough and oily. In common with the island’s other birds, it was easily caught: “Because there were no inhabitants living there who made them afraid, so nor were they afraid of us, but just remained sitting, allowing us to beat them to death.”

On later visits, the Dutch came to refer to the birds as _dodaersen—_fat-asses. In English, “dodo” was in use by the sixteen-twenties, perhaps through a simple process of linguistic evolution; but Hume likes the idea that the coinage was inspired, or at least reinforced, by the bird’s call. In Mauritius, I asked him what he thought it might have sounded like. He needed a moment’s persuading, but then made a deeply resonating woo-woo, like bass notes coming from a loud car stereo, heard at the distance of a few blocks. Nobody knows the true sound, just as “nobody knows what the dodo ate, how it lived,” Hume said. But his bashful impression was grounded in scientific knowledge; the dodo was, as he put it, “a bloody big pigeon.”

Conservationists sometimes speak of an “analogue species”: an animal that, for the sake of the approximate restoration of an ecosystem, can stand in for one that is unavailable. In the case of the dodo, “there is no analogue,” Hume told me. “A metre-high, giant flightless pigeon, with this absurd large bill and a bare face? There’s no equivalent.” At the time of colonization, the dodo did have at least one close relative—a slenderer bird on the island of Rodrigues, three hundred and fifty miles east of Mauritius. The Rodrigues solitaire, also flightless, also became extinct following human settlement. To the extent that these two species have living relatives, they are found farther east. Among the members of the 2006 Dodo Expedition was Beth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA in Oxford University’s zoology department—a thirty-one-year-old American who has already published five papers in the journal Science. In 2001, Shapiro analyzed DNA extracted from dodo and solitaire remains and showed that the living bird genealogically closest to them was the Nicobar pigeon, found in Southeast Asia. (The connection is distant: the dodo and the Nicobar pigeon—fully flighted and twelve inches long—separated from common ancestors around forty million years ago.) Shapiro’s research also suggested that the dodo is, as a species, much older than Mauritius, which emerged through volcanic activity no more than eight million years ago. The theory, then, is that Mauritius was colonized by a flighted version of the dodo. When the bird found itself in an environment without predators—Mauritius had no mammals besides bats—it stopped investing in wings. Instead of flying, it walked. Its wings shrank to about ten inches, as its body grew; in island geobiology, mammals tend to grow smaller over evolutionary time (like Borneo’s pygmy elephants), while birds expand. The adult dodos the Dutch saw in 1598 were probably three feet high and weighed about fifty pounds.

To the Dutch, the animal was noticeably strange. And these were literate times. So the dodo was given a small place in the written record, a privilege seldom before granted to a species that went on to become extinct; nobody ever recorded the taste of a woolly mammoth. (The Dutch paid almost no attention to other, duller Mauritian birds also doomed to extinction.) As a result, archives allow an occasional glimpse of the dodo: in 1611, the skin on a dodo’s head was said to resemble “a monk’s cowl”; seventeen years later, an English visitor saw an animal with small, diamond-like eyes, whose “visage darts 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.” A Dutch account from 1631 described dodos as “jaunty and audacious of gait. . . . Their war weapon was their mouth, with which they could bite fiercely; their food was fruit.” There are reports of the birds being caught and eaten in large quantities. We also know that some living specimens were taken off the island; there are at least two reliable accounts of live dodos making it as far as Europe. One—“a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turky cock”—was shown as a novelty in London in the late sixteen-thirties.

For several decades, the Dutch used Mauritius only as a way station. In the sixteen-thirties, a permanent population began to grow: the Dutch built a fort in the southeast of the island, to support a trade in ebony (indigenous) and sugarcane (introduced), using Madagascan slaves as labor; some of these slaves escaped to the island’s central highlands, starting a largely undocumented secondary colonization. Although the human population on Mauritius was never more than a few hundred during the period of Dutch control, the size of the dodo population seems to have diminished quickly; reported sightings became extremely rare. According to Hume and others, the damage was likely done less by human hunters than by other new arrivals: the monkeys, goats, pigs, and rats that competed for resources and ate dodo eggs.

The latest reliable report of a living dodo is dated 1688, but, as Hume sadly wrote in a recent paper, it had likely ceased to breed long before then, “with the last aged survivors hanging on in just a few remote places.” The Dutch abandoned the island in 1710, little more than a hundred years after their arrival. Although nobody noticed at the time, the dodo was by then extinct.

On my way to Mauritius, I went to Oxford, and at the university’s Museum of Natural History I met Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, a curator, who led me into a storeroom on the second floor. This was formerly a library—the site of the famous public meeting on evolution, in 1860, where Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, reportedly asked Thomas Huxley, the biologist, about his monkey ancestors. The room now houses specimens either too precious or too damaged to display. There was a tiger’s skeleton that had lost some of its claws, and a cracked waterfowl diorama that showed a loon falling through a hole in a lake.

Nowak-Kemp, who was in a hurry and moved very quickly, took two gray cardboard boxes from an unmarked drawer. They contained the Oxford Dodo, whose fame derives, in part, from the fact that it inspired Charles Dodgson—the local man who wrote as Lewis Carroll—to give the bird a role in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The first box contained the head of the bird, resting on tissue paper, in two parts. On the right lay a skull covered with mummified skin that had almost turned black; a few black hairs stood up from the top of the scalp, as if after an explosion in a cartoon. Beside that was a mask of skin from the other side of the skull; it had been peeled away by Victorian researchers. So, in an unsettling, Damien Hirst-like tableau, the bird was beak to beak with its own face. The other box held the bones of a dodo’s foot; again, a sheath of skin lay alongside them. With a not quite ironic show of professional pain, Nowak-Kemp pointed to a short, neat groove along the bone and explained that this was where Beth Shapiro had taken her DNA sample, in 2001.

The fragmentary Oxford Dodo is what remains of the corpse of a bird that was probably brought to England in the mid-seventeenth century and was later kept in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. According to legend, the stuffed bird had become so shopworn (or foul-smelling) by the mid-eighteenth century that someone at the Ashmolean tossed it onto a bonfire, at which point a visionary underling snatched the head and leg from the blaze. The story—a phoenix myth short of some key special effects—is untrue. It seems to derive from a mistranslation of museum records that were then kept in Latin. The quieter truth is that these dodo pieces somehow survived the specimen’s gradual crumbling to dust, a common enough fate for animal exhibits in museums. (Nowak-Kemp is annoyed that the combustion story survives; she pointed out that Bill Bryson’s recent best-seller “A Short History of Nearly Everything” repeats “this same rubbish.”)

In any case, the world was left without even a dead dodo. By the nineteenth century, the bird’s complete known physical existence had been reduced to the Oxford head and foot, another foot in London (since lost), a skull in Copenhagen, and a leg and a piece of beak in Prague. And, without the buttress of renown that the bird later had, the dodo could not be protected from a kind of second extinction. Because the remains were so meagre, and because the written and painted record was slight, and because the notion of species extinction had not yet been fully established, some serious-minded people came to doubt that the dodo had ever existed. An important nineteenth-century British zoological text argued that the dodo seen in a painting in the British Museum “appears to have existed only in the imagination of that artist.” The alternative was that “the species has been utterly extirpated since his time, which is scarcely probable.”

Not long after Mauritius was abandoned by the Dutch, it was colonized by France. A hundred years later, in 1810, Britain captured the island by force, and that action eventually triggered the posthumous recognition of the dodo; the takeover put the island within intellectual range of Britain’s natural philosophers, at a time of surging national interest in observational science. In 1816, a Mauritian scientific society held a meeting to ask the island’s oldest inhabitants if they remembered the dodo or any talk of it; they did not. By 1848, there was sufficient curiosity to allow the publication in Britain of a solid scientific study, “The Dodo and Its Kindred,” under the patronage of Prince Albert. The authors reviewed dodo evidence—the “rude descriptions of unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments”—and cleverly made the case that the bird was a peculiar form of pigeon (others had guessed vulture or ostrich). They also recognized that the dodo had been wiped out by human agency, which prompted an awkward theological dance: “We cannot see without regret the extinction of the last individual of any race of organic beings, whose progenitors colonized the pre-adamite Earth; but our consolation must be found in the reflection, that Man is destined by his Creator to ‘be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth and subdue it.’ ”

Not long after this study was published, the British Museum announced an interest in seeing dodo remains from Mauritius. George Clark, a British schoolteacher on the island, had already been searching for some, without luck. In 1865—the year that “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published and began to implant its dodo illustration (cane, cuffs) in the minds of millions—a British railway engineer working in the southeast of the island noticed bones that had been disturbed by men digging peat out of a marshy hollow. The area was known as the Mare aux Songes, which is sometimes translated, wistfully, as the Sea of Dreams but is more likely named for the starchy tropical root known in Mauritian French as songe. The railway engineer filled his pockets, and showed his haul to Clark, who identified the bones as dodo. Clark, in turn, dug up dozens more at the site, and sent a hundred to Richard Owen at the British Museum. Owen—the man who coined the word “dinosaur”—paid Clark a hundred pounds and quickly brought out a career-boosting book, “Memoir of the Dodo.” The skeleton built from those Mare aux Songes bones is the specimen still on display in the Natural History Museum in London. Clark sold hundreds of other dodo bones by auction; today, most dodo exhibits in museums derive from those sales.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a barber living in Mauritius found an almost complete dodo skeleton at an unrecorded spot on the island. (The specimen is now displayed in a Mauritian museum.) Dodo bones continued to be pulled out of the Mare aux Songes for a decade or so into the new century. After that, the site was forgotten: it was a mine that had saturated the market in its commodity.

When Hume began visiting Mauritius, in 1999, no new dodo bones had been found for almost a hundred years, and none had ever been excavated with scientific regard for position and context. He asked locals about the Mare aux Songes, and was told that the international airport had been laid on top of it. In an area of the airport used by the military, he could see a large dodo sculpture surrounded by picnic benches. These were protected by a high fence and a redlettered sign: “Keep Out.” All the same, Hume kept making inquiries, and in time he discovered that the site had survived, and lay not far from the airport’s perimeter fence, in one corner of a sixty-five-hundred-acre sugar estate called Mon Trésor. But the Mare was no longer marshland. During the Second World War, in an effort to combat malarial mosquitoes, British Army soldiers stationed in Mauritius had covered the area with a layer of volcanic rock up to six feet thick. Now grasses and ferns were growing on this hard surface: a crust of meadow sealing a swamp, like a crème brûlée. Hume paced the land, and even tried to dig by hand through the rock. (“How sad is that?” he asked me.) He had little doubt that many dodo remains lay beneath.

Meanwhile, another Briton was taking similar walks. Alan Grihault, a retired teacher, moved to the island with his Mauritian-born wife in 2000, and was surprised to learn that there was no standard glossy dodo book—the kind that tourists might buy in a hotel lobby and then forget to read. He began to gather material for one. He, too, found his way to the Mare aux Songes and, in his mind, became the site’s unofficial caretaker. “It was my place, a tranquil place,” Grihault said when we met. He kept an eye out for dodo bones that he hoped might emerge on the surface; none did. (Sara Grihault, who works for the British High Commission, told me that her husband’s dodo interest “sometimes gets to be a bit too much. Only two of us at home, so I hear everything, and sometimes twice, when he explains it to friends. Luckily I have the ability to switch off.”)

Grihault, whose good nature can be hidden behind a take-charge manner and a barking voice, pictured himself not only as the author of the coffee-table dodo text—which he eventually produced, “Dodo: The Bird Behind the Legend”—but as a player in a new dodo industry in Mauritius. He was sure that the Mare aux Songes had potential as a tourist destination and, in 2002, sought to interest the landowners in the idea. The estate was owned by Mon Trésor & Mon Désert, which also operates two other sugar estates on the island. Grihault submitted two memos about the Mare aux Songes to the M.T.M.D. board. His vision in those memos (the immoderation of which he now concedes) included plans for a dodo museum; a children’s play area, with a giant chess set featuring Lewis Carroll characters; a treasure trail; a “Dutch homestead”; a pirate museum; and a shop selling postcards that “could be taken from the book ‘Dodo: The Bird Behind the Legend.’ ”

None of this was done. But, in the years following Grihault’s presentation, M.T.M.D. began weighing the touristic potential of its land, in part because the European Union decided to end the practice of buying sugar from many former colonies at generous fixed prices. “Sugar goes down, dodo goes up,” in the words of one Dodo Expedition scientist. It seemed possible that Mauritius’s abandoned dodo mine might again turn a profit.

In October, 2005, Christian Foo Kune, the general manager of M.T.M.D., was welcoming when Grihault brought two affable, soft-spoken Dutch scientists onto his land: Kenneth Rijsdijk, a physical geographer, and Frans Bunnik, an expert on ancient and fossilized pollen. The two men were on their first visit to Mauritius, at the invitation of Pieter Floore, a Dutch archeologist who had been working for years at the site of the Dutch fort of the sixteen-thirties. Rijsdijk and Bunnik wanted to sample a range of Mauritian ecologies; toward the end of their stay, Grihault, who had introduced himself, offered to be their guide, and drove them to Mon Trésor. “We were humoring him, in a positive sense,” Rijsdijk said. “An eccentric person with a dodo fascination, very sincere, but I’m a specialist in sand and gravel, which couldn’t be more boring.”

The Dutchmen, who were carrying a hand-operated corkscrew-like device, were invited to take a sample of earth from the Mare aux Songes. They had to break through the crust of rock—a gruelling process that nearly defeated them. But they did it, and pulled out a tube of mud, leaving a hole in the earth. The next day, Bunnik reached into the ground and pulled out a piece of bone stained brown; he recognized it as the tibia of a large bird and said to Rijsdijk, “We’re in deep shit. I think this is dodo.”

At the start of the 2006 Dodo Expedition, I visited Christian Foo Kune in his office, a room with a high ceiling, parquet flooring, and, on the walls, seven sets of deer antlers. “The Mare aux Songes was a place where you couldn’t grow anything,” he said. “You couldn’t plant cane—it’s a depression, always muddy. And then, suddenly, through the expert eyes of our friends, the scientists, it becomes a treasure.” He showed me an aerial photograph of the estate and traced out his ambitions for the future, starting with the coastline half a mile from the Mare aux Songes: “There will be a golf course here, probably a hotel here, a residential area, and this is a public space, a common place, with trees and shade . . .”

The Dodo Expedition, an adventure in diplomacy and marketing as much as in paleontology, was made up of the three Dutchmen from the previous year and a number of scientists from Holland, Britain, and Mauritius, including Julian Hume—the team’s true dodo expert—and Beth Shapiro, the expedition’s academic highflier, who hoped to extract DNA from new dodo remains and perhaps use it to gauge changes in dodo population size over time. Hosted by M.T.M.D., the expedition was allowed the use of a single-story house in the company village on the Mon Trésor estate, a place of tall palm trees and stray dogs built on a grid around a sugar mill: a Dutch enclave on an African tropical island that is now inhabited mostly by Francophone people of Indian ancestry. Shapiro, the only woman researcher, called it “the frat house.”

The team’s ambition was expressed, above all, as a rather stern negative: the Dodo Expedition was not prospecting for dodos. The project wanted to distinguish itself from George Clark’s treasure dig of the eighteen-sixties. But the Dutchmen were also hoping to edge away from their own brief, impromptu dig of 2005. That year, when Bunnik lifted the first dodo bone out of the dirt, he foresaw trouble. “I immediately thought, How can we manage this scientifically, when even archeologists will want to fill their pockets with dodo bones?” Hoping that the excavation would remain a secret but knowing that it would not, they borrowed a digger, and in two days found nearly a thousand bones, including a dodo beak, which were taken into the possession of M.T.M.D. Then, keeping to their schedule, they left the island.

This did not look good. Although the excavation had been done with the landowners’ encouragement, they did not have permission from the Mauritian National Heritage Fund, as was perhaps required. (This is disputed.) Nor had any Mauritian expertise been sought. Some local journalists and academics, including Vijaya Teelock, who teaches history at the University of Mauritius, detected a neo-colonial slight. Teelock told me that there was “no reason not to have a Mauritian-directed project” at the Mare aux Songes. In a similar spirit, the English-language News on Sunday ran an editorial cartoon showing two goofy, salivating, wide-eyed Caucasians chasing a dodo skeleton. The dodo was saying, “You’ve eaten all my flesh, can’t you allow my bones to rest in peace?” And there were rumors that the Dutchmen had smuggled dodo remains out of the country by disguising them as chicken bones. This was false, although Foo Kune did send two dodo bones to Holland by D.H.L. after the Dutch team returned home; these were used in DNA and carbon-dating experiments.

For the 2006 expedition, then, the team made sure that it had its permits. It also asked Anwar Janoo, a Mauritian paleontologist who has published on the dodo, to participate, and it invested heavily in waterproof labels and Ziploc bags, to establish a bone-accounting system that could withstand scientific and political scrutiny. Every soil sample would be studied, layer by layer, to distinguish one historical period from the next. (Shapiro was somewhat skeptical: it was odd to put so much emphasis on formal archeological techniques, she said, when working in a swamp that had been partially dug up for fertilizer in the nineteenth century, dug up again for dodos, and later covered with rocks.) The expedition also underscored its interest in all flora and fauna at the site, not just dodos. That ecological catholicism was sincere but sat a little awkwardly with what might be called the team’s brand: the dodo in the project name, on its letterhead, and on the bright-orange polo shirts worn by the scientists.

Hume, a professional scientist with something of the amateur’s obsessiveness, had the task of identifying bird remains. He could recognize, with uncanny speed and accuracy, every bone from every Mauritian bird, even when the specimen was smaller than a toothpick. On a warm day in June, he and his colleagues began working their way through the first batch of mud at the Mare aux Songes, and I was watching as someone brought him a pale bone covered in dark earth. It seemed to weigh almost nothing. Hume said, “That’s a dodo pelvis.” A little later: “That’s a dodo vertebra.” Later, giddily: “Ooh, that’s a nice humerus. Fantastic.”

On that first day of excavation, bones seemed to be spilling out of the ground. A fragment of the Mauritian giant tortoise (such as Dutch sailors once rode upon) that at the start of the day would have brought the team together in a cooing huddle of self-congratulation was, a little later, washed and processed without comment. Along with the giant tortoise (extinct since the eighteenth century), the team also found bones of the Mauritian giant skink, a three-foot-long lizard, also now extinct, along with hundreds of seeds of the now rare tambalacoque tree. The abundance of the site was startling. “Are we looking at a tsunami that washed in bones and seeds from the region?” Bunnik asked himself as he ate his picnic lunch under a tree. “It doesn’t look like it, because we’d find coarse coral rocks, which we haven’t. Or was it cyclonic? Huge rainfall, trees falling all around? A period of cyclones over a hundred years?” Rijsdijk allowed himself a moment of wonder at the scientists’ proximity to “a world that didn’t understand violence and competition.” (In the past, dodo bones have been found that show a healed fracture—an unimaginable thing in most environments, where a broken leg is an animal’s death sentence.)

That night, the collected material was placed in plastic wrap and laid out on the floor of a company training room in the shadow of the sugar factory—all except the dodo bones, which were locked up in Foo Kune’s office, in a large antique safe that contained nothing except shotguns and dodo. “The safe may be a little much,” Rijsdijk said.

At the bungalow, which smelled strongly of dirty socks, Hume showed me a sketchbook with some of his recent bird paintings: nineteen extinct species of Réunion, the French island a hundred miles to the west of Mauritius. They were done in a solid Sunday-painter realist style, with the added element of resurrection: long-dead birds strolled and pecked in the foreground, against backgrounds of forest and mountain. While some of the images had called upon strong evidence—surviving skins, skeletons, and drawings—others had to rely on little more than seventeenth-century gossip. “This one is really a shot in the dark,” Hume said, stopping at one page. “A single observer mentioned a parrot, no bones were found, no other description made.” On another page: “This one, known only by one bone.” And then, “The only record was ‘a pigeon with blue wings.’ ” Hume added, “I still think the best science was done in the nineteenth century. They didn’t rely on taking stuff to a laboratory and getting results. They had to look at the bones, read the accounts.” On the living-room wall, someone had put up a poster-size outline of a dodo skeleton; the bones that had been found that day were shaded in with a red pencil.

In the botanical gardens of Curepipe, an inland Mauritian town, an unmarked palm tree stands thirty feet high, surrounded by scaffolding. This is a kind of hurricane palm, Hyophorbe amaricaulis: a species indigenous to Mauritius that is as close to extinction as a non-extinct species can be. The specimen here is the only known example in the world. As I stood beside it one afternoon in light rain, Faizal Bhoondoo, a gardener, walked up the path, and we talked for a few minutes about the prices of mobile phones in the United States and species extinction. Bhoondoo, who is a Muslim, said, “Extinction is God’s will. If God wants it, it’s impossible to know why.” He added, “Time and death wait for no man.” I asked him if it would be God’s will if someone took the machete he was carrying and brought down the last remaining Hyophorbe amaricaulis, making the species at that moment extinct. “Yes,” he said, although he added that he would think badly of the person who did that, and he tightened his grip on his machete.

Mauritius accepts its role as the world’s capital of extinction with little apparent discomfort. Though the dodo may be known elsewhere as a forlorn symbol of human toxicity, in Mauritius the bird is a grinning caricature inside tourist snow globes and the premise for a “dodo” cocktail that carries the kind of surface froth you see in a heavily polluted river. In different conversations, I heard that the dodo was still alive in Madagascar; was a myth; and was “crazy and unintelligent.” There was no regret: when I asked Foo Kune if there were risks in making too close a national identification with the bird, and therefore with untimely death, he said, “The Dutch destroyed the dodo, and we Mauritians had nothing to do with it”—a bold rhetorical stand. In the Mauritius Institute, in the capital, Port Louis, the placard for the dodo skeleton on display is unexpectedly upbeat. It reads, in part, “The dodo’s extinction helped to put Mauritius on the map.” A Mauritian told me that his elderly uncle still said how glad he was that dodos were wiped out, because they would have disturbed his flower beds and “crapped all over the lawn.”

One morning, Kenneth Rijsdijk and Frans Bunnik left the Mon Trésor estate, drove for a few miles on roads that made right-angle turns through the sugarcane, and stopped at a large house with a gravel drive. Pierre Bourgault du Coudray, a local landowner now retired from business, met us at the door, with two small yapping dogs, and led the way to a living room full of paintings and fine furniture, an environment that made his guests feel weather-beaten and unwashed. He had been watching the French Open on television; he left the set on, and muted the sound. He was elderly and rather frail, but had an air of ruling-class authority.

It is a part of dodo mythology, in Mauritius and beyond, that the birds used gizzard stones—that they swallowed stones and retained them in their guts to grind away at stubborn elements in their diet. Some living birds do exactly that, but there’s no evidence that dodos did; and if they did the stones would likely be small, jagged, and anonymous, according to Hume. But the Dodo Expedition had been invited to inspect a precious piece of rock in Bourgault du Coudray’s private collection, and it was thought politic to go. “You have to do it—it’s part of the game,” Rijsdijk had said. (The game also included a hint of national penitence: team members rarely left the estate without someone saying, “Where are you from? Holland? Oh, you ate all the dodos.”)

When Bourgault du Coudray left the room to fetch the stone, Rijsdijk took out a magnifying glass and said quietly that he hoped the tool would make him look more professional. His host returned with a smooth, round object that was the size of a plum. Speaking French, he said that he had found it in a nearby field about twenty-five years earlier. Rijsdijk looked at it through his magnifying glass. For this exercise in courtesy, the room was solemnly quiet. Rijsdijk said that he could see organic matter lodged in tiny holes that dotted the surface of the stone, suggesting it had come from peat, and so might have been dug out of the Mare aux Songes. Then he passed it to Bunnik, who said exactly the same, with the same generosity. He managed to add, “The rounding is unusual.”

Bourgault du Coudray, who had no doubt that he owned a dodo’s gizzard stone, said, in English, “It’s unique in the world.”

The Dutchmen nodded. “There’s no process we can think of that would produce this remarkable roundness,” Rijsdijk said, choosing his words carefully.

The dodo team’s routine was to rise very early, take a minibus to the Mare aux Songes, then sieve mud with earnest good humor until dusk. After the researchers returned to the bungalow each day, a Mon Trésor cook made them supper, and then they slumped on low foam furniture and watched soccer on a television that had a garishly colored—and in other ways unforgivably inaccurate—model dodo on top of it. The team worked without interruption, although one day Hume drove two hours to Port Louis, to inspect some of the hundreds of dodo bones at the Mauritius Institute. They were in plastic sandwich boxes on the second floor—and minimally catalogued—and sounded like domino tiles when they rattled against one another. Leaving the museum, Hume passed a full-scale century-old model of a dodo: a squat, fat exhibit made of goose feathers and plaster. “It should be more upright, more athletic—the neck should be longer,” Hume said, but without any note of complaint. “It’s a nice image. At the Natural History Museum in London, there was talk of getting rid of these reconstructions because they’re not accurate. But they’re so important historically! This was considered natural at the time; let’s respect that.”

At the bungalow, the dodo poster taped to the living-room wall was becoming redder, day by day and vertebra by vertebra. After a week’s digging, there was so much material that the team ran out of plastic bags. The profusion of fossils (or, more accurately, subfossils; these hadn’t turned to stone) gave the project a sense of momentum that almost disguised a hint of disappointment. Were the researchers making true scientific progress? To put it baldly, would they be able to publish in Nature or Science? They had collected close to four thousand bones but had identified no new species, as they might have expected, and although they had unearthed the rare jaw of an extinct parrot and a near-complete carapace of a Mauritian giant tortoise, as well as a hard, black stumpy bone eventually identified as a tortoise’s tail vertebra—the first ever seen—they had not found any extraordinary, unprecedented dodo specimen that would have made front-page news or significantly expanded dodo knowledge. The dodo looked likely to remain known and unknown; that is, Hume could continue to paint the bird with some anatomical confidence but would still have to accept that almost everything else about it remained hidden, and no less hidden for the discovery of dozens of fresh bones. The expedition had thought it might find a dodo infant, say, or an egg, or a whole bird. (Hume had hoped to dig up the world’s first complete skeleton, which would have given science the sure knowledge of the ratio of a dodo’s bone measurements; with that information, one would know the size of every dodo ever unearthed, even if represented by only a single bone.) But no such discoveries had been made.

It was also becoming clear that the team was finding material from a fairly narrow historical range, at a moment perhaps four thousand years ago. Instead of following a biological narrative, the expedition had cracked open a time capsule. This meant that Shapiro could not try to calculate rises and falls in dodo population sizes, as she had done for mammoths and bison: that kind of work requires comparisons of mitochondrial DNA across historical time. And the team would be unable to make inferences about the impact of the Dutch arrival on the virgin flora and fauna of Mauritius, as had been hoped: the Mare aux Songes held no remains that could be dated from after the start of human colonization. It was becoming clear that by the nineteen-forties, when volcanic rock sealed the marsh, the top layers of soil had long since been removed, either by natural means or by people. Hume realized that, against his usual instincts, he was lamenting the site’s lack of introduced species. In the earth below the crust of rock, there were no signs of rats, monkeys, or hubcaps.

“Can we say the state of preservation at the Mare aux Songes is remarkable?” Foo Kune asked the team anxiously one day, inviting them to stoke his enthusiasm. “Can I say that to my boss?”

“Yes, yes!” they cried.

In the absence of a trophy dodo specimen, the researchers focussed on the broader ecological picture—the stuff that fills the private dreams of pollen men and gravel men but is harder to put in a press release. Members of the 2006 expedition were becoming curiously aligned with their Dutch counterparts four hundred years earlier: the news that they would carry away—their scientific discovery—would be a glimpse of a lost landscape, and the dodo would stand on the edge of the frame. The team would be able to report that several thousand years ago a lava tunnel collapsed and filled with fresh water, and, in a fairly dry environment, this lake had drawn a clattering, shrieking crowd of tortoises and birds that ate and fed and mated beneath trees that dropped fruit into the water. “Have you heard giant tortoises mate?” Hume asked me. “And dodos were almost certainly very territorial animals—this might have been a big fighting area, with the strongest animals defending territory around the water. Loads of movement and activity, almost like an African watering hole.” Perhaps forgivably, Hume began calling it a “dodo oasis.”

Volcanic islands are acidic, and their biological past is rarely preserved, but at the Mare aux Songes acidity had been buffered by alkaline coral sand blown in from the beach. Even the tiniest bones had been preserved, along with seeds—“as fresh as if they’d fallen the day before,” in Hume’s words. Over time—perhaps in a period of only a few hundred years—the lake had silted up, leaving the Mare aux Songes as an immaculate record of a recent prehuman moment. “It’s unheard of, to find this on an oceanic island, this concentration, a snapshot of an entire ecosystem,” Rijsdijk said. More research would certainly reveal more detail about the fruit bats, tambalacoque trees, and dodos that lived near the lake. And Hume would be able to add more and more detail to his painted restorations of Edenic Mauritius. Even after this first proper excursion, the team felt able to claim membership in an exclusive club: they began to call the Mare aux Songes a Lagerstätte, the word that paleontologists use to refer to fossil sites that are exceptionally bountiful—either in concentration or in preservation of specimens—such as the Burgess Shale, in Canada, and Chengjiang, in China.

The Dodo Expedition involved a fairly innocent exchange of deceptions: a group of Mauritian landowners exaggerated their interest in science, for the sake of future tourists, and, in return, Dutch scientists exaggerated their interest in dodos, for the sake of access to a prehistoric marsh. The deal seemed to hold, although one sensed its fragility when, one afternoon not long before the team flew back to Europe, Christian Foo Kune brought the board of M.T.M.D., including the managing director, Georges Leung Shing, for a visit to the Mare aux Songes. They stepped out of a minibus into thick mud. Leung Shing was dressed as if for a business lunch in Paris, and his hands constantly darted—to his face, his cuffs, his collar—as he and his colleagues tiptoed from dry spot to dry spot.

The group stopped under a tree, Hume showed them some dodo bones, and Leung Shing asked Beth Shapiro whether, using the kind of material that the expedition was unearthing, she could clone a dodo.

“No,” she said, in a friendly enough way.

“Really?” Leung Shing asked. “But they’re cloning things today. So why not?” His tone was playful, but he was more than half serious.

“They’re cloning things that are still alive,” Shapiro said. She then talked about the importance of protecting surviving species before trying to revive extinct ones. (A researcher who works with ancient DNA has to have a cocktail-party stump speech about dinosaur and dodo clones.) Besides, she added, the environment in which dodos once thrived had disappeared.

“We can re-create that environment!” Leung Shing said. He reminded Shapiro that M.T.M.D. had already begun to replant some of Mauritius’s threatened indigenous trees. “By the time we clone the dodo, we might have the habitat for them,” he said.

“Dodoland?” Shapiro said, smiling. “It’s not going to happen.”

“You’re killing me,” he told her. “Last night, I was so excited about coming down here that I had a dream and saw some dodos walking around. Give me hope!” But Shapiro could not. Leung Shing made a joke about finding a more accommodating DNA researcher, to replace her, and then returned to the minibus. The scientists went back to work, behind a mound of dirt. ♦