If we regard the details of vibrant diversity as precious and glorious—and not as superfluous baubles upon Platonic essences—then the profession of preservation becomes one of the most noble callings that a person can undertake for a life’s work. I shall not discuss the happy side of preservation—the restoration to vitality of lingering institutions otherwise doomed (though people who
follow this calling are doubly blessed). I shall focus instead on what many people may regard as a preeminent exercise in frustration, the ultimate job for stoics, and the incarnation of numerous proverbs best represented by closing the stable door after a horse has permanently bolted: the assiduous collection, and meticulous preservation, of remains—often so few, partial, and pitiful—of people,
cultures, species, and places that have permanently disappeared.
In my profession of natural history, the people charged with preserving such artifacts do their work in museums and carry the title of curator, or head (literally caretaker) of a collection. Curators do not generally enjoy high status (or salary), in large part because we unfairly devalue their activities, including the task of
rescue highlighted in this essay. Our disparagement of the preservational role as either ineffably sad or almost risibly impotent (a beak in a drawer instead of ten thousand brilliantly plumed and beautifully singing birds in the bush) strikes me as greatly unfair on several grounds.
I have never met a curator who would not prefer the happier task of restoring a remnant to vitality. Nearly anyone
in this line of work would take a bullet for the last pregnant dodo. But should we not admire the person who, when faced with an overwhelmingly sad reality beyond any personal blame or control, strives valiantly to rescue whatever can be salvaged, rather than retreating to the nearest corner to weep or assign fault?
Most important, the nobility of preservation arises from the nature of history
itself. We needn’t fret because we have no specimens of Cambrian quartz from Florida, or cannot photograph a Jurassic rainbow. Such simple objects, directly formed under unchanging laws of nature, do not vary in interesting ways from time to time or place to place. But complex objects of history, unpredictable in principle, and generated but once in all their detailed and unrepeatable glory, must
utterly disappear from human understanding unless we preserve a record of their actual existence. Millions of species lived and died without leaving a single fossil sign of their residence on Earth. And we shall never greet them—a sad thought for a paleontologist with an insatiable desire to grasp the full richness of life’s past. To know a physical phenomenon, we must understand the laws that govern
its generation. To know a historical entity, we must preserve a record. Blessed be the recorders and collectors (see chapter 9 on a poignant and unusual case of preservation).
I want to consider the curator’s role—as heroic rather than futile—in preserving the merest scraps of a record in three inaugural losses of particular symbolic importance: the extinction of the first large terrestrial mammal
in 1799; the extirpation, in the 1680s, of the first animal clearly driven to death in historic times by human agency; and the genocide of the first human group encountered by Westerners in the New World, greeted in 1492 and obliterated by 1508.
Two common features intrigue me, and tell us something important about human psychology and the conceptual prejudices of Western life. First, in each
case, only a paltry record could be salvaged, and all prominent preservationists focus upon this particular sadness as symbolizing the senselessness of loss. Second, and almost oddly in contradiction, all major commentators also denigrate the lost creatures as doomed by their own inadequacies—as if to expiate any guilt for the rapaciousness that made preservation necessary in the first place! Must
we always blame the victims because we can’t bear the truthful conclusion that baleful events really didn’t need to occur? Inadequacy must lead to eventual doom, but excellence need not wither.
In 1799, a South African hunter shot the last blaauwbock, or blue antelope (
Hippotragus leucophaeus
). This species, already reduced to a tiny population living in a small area, did not come to the attention
of Europeans until 1719, and did not receive a formal description until 1766. Western culture surely delivered the coup de grâce, but the blaauwbock had already been doomed either purely in the course of nature, or partly though deterioration of habitat caused by domestic sheep introduced to the region by native Africans as early as A.D. 400. This short interval of knowledge, and the animal’s
rarity, led to near disappearance of all palpable records. Only four mounted specimens survive in museums—the “four antelopes of the apocalypse” of my previous essay devoted to this story (reprinted in an earlier volume of essays,
Dinosaur in a Haystack
). All commentators have invoked the extreme paucity of preserved remains to carry the moral of this particular tale, and of the generality thus
represented.
The first recorded extinction by human agency has become an almost automatic symbol, universally known and cited in all modes of communication—conceptually, iconographically, and even linguistically. “Dead as a doornail” only refers to immobility, for a doornail is a bolt, not a fastener. “Dead as a dodo” means totally and forever.
The Mascarene Islands—Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues—located
east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, have lost many species of birds to direct and indirect results of human activity. But the prototype and grand-daddy of all extinctions also occurred here, with the death of all three species in a unique family of flightless pigeons—the solitaire of Rodrigues, last seen in the 1790s; the solitaire of Reunion (probably more closely related to
the dodo), gone by 1746; and the celebrated dodo of Mauritius, last encountered in the early 1680s and almost surely extinct by 1690.
Although Portuguese sailors reached the previously uninhabited Mascarenes in the early sixteenth century, no mention of the dodo has been found before the narrative of the Dutch voyage of Jacob Cornelius Van Neck, who returned to Holland in 1599. The botanist Carolus
Clusius provided the first scientific description in 1605, after observing the foot of a dodo in the home of his friend, the anatomist Peter Paauw.
Large dodos weighed more than fifty pounds. They grew a bluish gray plumage on a squarish, shon-legged body, surmounted by a large head, free of facial feathers, and bearing a large bill with a strongly hooked tip. The wings were small and apparently
useless (at least for any form of flight). Dodos laid single eggs in ground nests.
What could be easier to catch than a lumbering giant flightless pigeon? Dutch sailors didn’t like the meat, and originally called the dodo a
Walgvogel
, or nauseating bird. But some portions, well cooked, tasted good enough—and no ship’s victualer could afford to sneeze at such a free and bounteous supply of meat
on the hoof (or vestigial wing), so to speak. Still, capture for human consumption probably didn’t seal the dodo’s fate, for extinction occurred primarily by indirect effects of human disturbance. Early sailors brought pigs and monkeys to the Mascarenes, and both multiplied prodigiously. Both species apparently feasted on dodo eggs, easily acquired from the unprotected ground nests—and most naturalists
attribute a greater proportion of deaths to these imports than to direct human action. In any case, no one ever saw a live dodo on Mauritius after the early 1680s. In 1693, the French explorer Leguat spent several months on Mauritius, looked hard for dodos, and found none.
Dodos provide a particularly good illustration for my two conflicting principles: lament at the paucity of preserved remains,
and blame for death largely laid to the victim’s inadequacy. Human contact may have lasted less than a century, but dodos were both locally abundant and well documented. In this context, remarkably little remains in our museums as a testimony to this prototype of all extinctions. Several seventeenth-century paintings and drawings exist, some made in Europe, and apparently from life. We have no
absolute proof that living dodos ever arrived in Western nations, but strong circumstantial evidence suggests that nine or ten birds might have come to Holland, two to England, one to Genoa, two apparently to India, and one, perhaps, even to Japan. H. E. Strickland, author of the classic 1848 monograph on the dodo, spoke of this paucity of evidence:
We possess only the rude descriptions of unscientific
voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments, which have survived the neglect of two hundred years. The paleontologist has, in many cases, far better data for determining the zoological characters of a species which perished myriads of years ago.
A few partial skeletons and many scattered bones, most excavated from Mauritian bogs after 1850, now grace our museums,
but remarkably little evidence remains from birds that humans saw alive. Copenhagen has a skull, Prague a bit of a beak. Of flesh and blood, we have only one preserved foot in the British Museum, and a head and foot in Oxford. What a paltry legacy for an animal that occupies such a central place in our legends and history!
The tale of the last dodo is especially poignant. A complete stuffed specimen
existed in the collection of John Tradescant, developer of the first important English museum of natural history. Tradescant, bequeathed his collection to Elias Ashmole, who then founded the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. There the specimen languished and rotted away until, in 1755, the directors of the museum consigned the “LAST OF THE DODOS” to the flames (to cite Strickland’s words
in his own upper case). An astute curator managed to save the head and one foot—virtually the only fleshly evidence now existing for the first animal driven to extinction by modern humans. Nearly a century later, the great geologist Charles Lyell described this desecration in words redolent of pain, and expressing the solemn duty of all true curators: to preserve the remains when we cannot rescue
the living, and to maintain the records when we cannot even conserve the remains—lest we forget, lest we forget:
Some have complained that inscriptions on tombstones convey no general information except that individuals were born and died—accidents which happen alike to all men. But the death of a species is so remarkable an event in natural history, that it deserves commemoration; and it is
with no small interest that we learn from the archives of the University of Oxford the exact day and year when the remains of the last specimen of the Dodo, which had been permitted to rot in the Ashmolean Museum, were cast away.
Strickland used the same argument to justify the time and expense of publishing a monograph on “the first clearly attested instance of the extinction of organic species
through human agency.” We may well mark his prophetic words in our current age of greatly accelerated anthropogenic extinction:
We cannot see without regret the extinction of the last individual of any race of organic beings, whose progenitors colonized the pre-Adamitic Earth . . . The progress of Man in civilization, no less than his numerical increase, continually extends the geographical
domain of Art by trenching on the territories of Nature, and hence the zoologist or botanist of future ages will have a much narrower field for his researches than that which we enjoy at present. It is, therefore, the duty of the naturalist to preserve to the Stores of Science the knowledge of these ancient and expiring organisms, when he is unable to preserve their lives; so that our acquaintance
with the marvels of Animal and Vegetable existence may suffer no detriment by the losses which the organic creation seems destined to sustain.
Yet, for all these expressions of sadness and determination, few naturalists ever spoke well of the poor dodo while it lived, or even later when theory demanded a rationale for the dodo’s extinction, and “blaming the victim” seemed an easier course than
admitting an eminently avoidable tragedy. What creature has ever been subjected to more ridicule and derision? To be sure, the dodo was not a lovely creature by our conventional standards of beauty. The bird seemed inept, again by our inappropriate criteria—a waddling creature, incapable of flight and condemned to raising nestlings on the open ground. But have we not been taught to look behind
overt appearance? Could we not, in words of the great British anatomist Richard Owen, champion “the beauty of its ugliness”?
On the contrary, we did nothing but deride and stigmatize. Diverse theories for the dodo’s etymology agree on only one point: whatever the derivation, the intent was surely pejorative. Some ascribe
dodo
to a Portuguese word for “foolish” (unlikely, since the few Portuguese
sailors to the Mascarenes never mentioned dodos). Others derive the name from
dodoor
, a Dutch word for “sluggard.” Most seventeenth-century sources cite some orthographic variant of
dodaers
—the name generally used by Dutch sailors, and meaning, roughly, “fat ass.” Moreover, the official scientific names show no more
gentilesse.
Linnaeus called the species
Didus ineptus—Didus
as a Latinization
of
dodo
, and
ineptus
for obvious reasons. Modern ornithologists often use the earlier name
Raphus
, given by the naturalist Moehring as a Latinization of the Dutch
reet
, a vulgar term for “rump.”
From the very beginning, even while the dodo lived in prosperity on Mauritius, European descriptions dripped with disdain. For example, in 1658, the naturalist Bontius began the tradition of blaming the
victim, even before the eventual outcome, by linking the dodo’s deficiencies to ease of capture: “It hath a great, ill-favored head . . . It is a slow-placed and stupid bird, and which easily becomes a prey to the fowlers.”
After 1690, the chorus of disdain only increased, for now the dodo could be blamed for its singular fate. Consider the mid-eighteenth-century description of that ultimate
arbiter of taste in science, the preeminent naturalist Georges Buffon, best remembered today in general culture for his motto,
“le style c’est l’homme même”
(the style is the man himself). Buffon, as cited in chapter 20, regarded the sloth as a prototype of ugliness and inadequacy among mammals. Thus, in labeling the dodo as a sloth among birds, Buffon could not have made his judgment more clear
or cutting: