specimen damage or loss was common, especially at a time when taxidermy was in its infancy and museum records were relatively crude. Those surviving dodo specimens gradually dwindled to a mere handful.

"There used to be a complete dodo in Oxford, but they had to discard the majority of the specimen in the 1700s," says Claessens. "They kept just the head and foot."

The British Museum also had a dodo foot. "But they lost it about a century ago," says Claessens. There is also a dodo skull in Copenhagen and part of a beak in Prague. "And that's really it."

Inadvertently, Strickland and Melville had kick-started a wave of dodo-mania

In the early 17th Century, Mauritius had been home to countless dodos. But by the early 19th Century not even one completebird skeleton survived in a museum. The dodo was lost for a second time.

In fact, the dodo might have fallen into obscurity forever, if not for the work of two Victorian researchers, Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Melville. In 1848 they published a monograph, The Dodo and its Kindred.

"It's a gorgeous book," says Claessens. "It's based mostly on what they could discover from the Oxford and British Museum specimens, and it helped make dodos rather hot in the Victorian period."

Inadvertently, Strickland and Melville had kick-started a wave of dodo-mania. This arguably reached a peak when the bird featured in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

By this time Mauritius had become a British colony, and the island became the focus of intense palaeontological interest. Were there fossil dodos