Dodo Bird

All real Dodo skeletons in museums and private collections today are composites made up from bones that belonged to several individual animals. The only one dodo skeleton that is made up from the bones of a single animal was sold in 2016 for $430.000

The Dodo bird (lat.: Raphus Cucullatus) was a flightless bird and native to the island of Mauritius. The closest relatives to the dodo are pigeons and doves, but the dodo was much larger in size. The biggest found birds could be around 1m (36“ or 3 feet) tall and weighted about 18kg (2,857 stones or 40 lb). That was possible, because of the isolation of it’s habitat island without any natural predators, unfortunately that led also to their extinction. Humans ate the birds and brought rats and cats with them.
Known for their slightly comical appearance, a living bird was last seen on the island of Maritius in 1662, just 70 years after its discovery.

Dodos as a species are pretty significant and there bones are scattered across the globe in a number of museums, where people seek them out when they visit. But there is little known about how the bird really lived, how it moved, even the colour of its feathers are not really known anymore.

I worked for many years on this sculpture and had the privileged to have seen many museum pieces around the world. With the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I began to collect all knowledge I could find, to build my own Dodo skeleton.

I used the newest scientific publications, 3d Scans and castings from real bones for my work, that took me years to find and get.

My Dodo is a combination of the old style we see in museums with the new knowledge we have today about posture and bone structure. Also it’s around 100 bones, I made the decision not to have a 100% perfect skeleton and some bones are missing, like in a real museum piece.

Most dodo bones in museums are brown, because they are mostly sub-fossils found in the Mare aux Songes (a swamp on Mauritius) that gave them they’re color.
Because of that I gave my Dodo sculpture the some familiar old weathered look.

The head with the neck is removable for easy shipping.

The height is 77cm / 30”
The round wooden base with 39 cm / 15,75” diameter is made from European hardwood (FSC certified) with multiple coats of oils, varnish and real chellac.

It’s made with only the best materials and art paints available and will be shipped worldwide in a big box with lots of packing material.

By the way, the apples, chairs and tables in some of the pictures are for size comparison. It’s a big bird 😉

For any questions or more pictures feel free to contact me.