Richard Owen opens with William Broderip’s history of the dodo, gathering the written and pictorial evidence from early voyagers and the scant relics once held at Oxford and the British Museum. He then describes, bone by bone and with plates, the skeleton that newly recovered remains allowed him to reconstruct, settling what the vanished bird of Mauritius actually looked like.
A landmark of Victorian comparative anatomy, of real interest to anyone fascinated by extinction. Download the free EPUB.