of his finds were a number of dodo bones, probably dating from the last millennia before the bird's extinction.

Thirioux was convinced that his finds were important. He offered to sell them to Newton, who was still working away in Cambridge 40 years after Owen had thwarted his dodo plans.

But Newton did not jump at the opportunity to finally get to grips with some new dodo bones. He valued Thirioux's entire collection at just £20, a figure so low as to be almost insulting.

Disappointed, Thirioux hung on to his dodos until his death. Today, one of his dodo skeletons is on display at the Natural History Museum in Port Louis, Mauritius. A second can be seen in the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa.

"It's almost as if Thiriouxfound his dodos at the wrong time," says Claessens.

The dodo-mania of the 19th Century had ebbed away, and the era of modern palaeobiology – with its emphasis on the importance of complete skeletons from individuals – was still decades away. Newton's offer may have been so low because there was a real sense, in 1901, that the dodo was a solved mystery. There was nothing left to discover about the bird.

But Claessens and his colleagues see things differently today.

They have begun studying Thirioux's dodos. After careful examination of the bones – including a study of their shape, size, and even their colour, which gives an idea of how they have been preserved down the centuries – the researchers have found a remarkable degree of uniformity.

For the first time