in 1598, marking the beginning of the end for the species.

Europe's 17th-Century scientists did not realise quite how valuable their dodo specimens were

But the sailors themselves did not make much of a contribution to the dodo's extinction, says Claessens. "At most there were a few hundred people living in a coastal settlement," he says.

The problem was more likely the ship rats and other animals they brought with them, which spread across the island, eating dodo eggs and outcompeting the birds for food.

The last confirmed sightings came in the 1660s. The dodo was lost forever.

Or, at least, the living dodo was lost. But specimens of the strange bird had already been sent to Europe for scientific study. In several museums and university collections, skeletons and stuffed dodos survived.

There usedto be a complete dodo in Oxford, but they had to discard the majority of the specimen in the 1700s

Unfortunately, Europe's 17th-Century scientists did not realise quite how valuable their dodo specimens were.

The problem was that the dodo had disappeared at the wrong time. Its extinction came long before scientists were willing to accept that species really could vanish forever. Why, they argued, would an all-powerful God doom some of his valuable creations to such a fate?

The great French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier is widely credited with alerting the scientific world to the reality of extinction, but he did not do so until 1796.

This meant that 17th and 18th Century museum curators felt confident that there were more dodos out there to replace any specimens that became damaged. Also,