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 Oxforddecided 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 supposea 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 saurapodsthan 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,
