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By Root 1841 0

we don't know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being—a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up.

The indignities to the poor dodo didn't end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo's death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution's stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb.

As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose—a handful of crude descriptions by “unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments,” in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth-century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence.

So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland's “osseous fragments” and the Ashmolean's modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don't possess a single dodo egg.

From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years. That is a breathtakingly scanty period—though it must be said that by this point in our history we did have thousands of years of practice behind us in the matter of irreversible eliminations. Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.

In America, thirty genera of large animals—some very large indeed—disappeared practically at a stroke after the arrival of modern humans on the continent between ten and twenty thousand years ago. Altogether North and South America between them lost about three quarters of their big animals once man the hunter arrived with his flint-headed spears and keen organizational capabilities. Europe and Asia, where the animals had had longer to evolve a useful wariness of humans, lost between a third and a half of their big creatures. Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost no less than 95 percent.

Because the early hunter populations were comparatively small and the animal populations truly monumental—as many as ten million mammoth carcasses are thought to lie frozen in the tundra