Africa-Press – Mauritius. It’s actually several parts of one animal — there’s a leathery, worn head, a dissected foot and a few feathers. Known as the ‘Oxford dodo’, this specimen is the only surviving soft tissue remains of the extinct species.
For some, the remains are a warning of humanity’s disregard for nature; for others, they evoke hope that dodo DNA still exists for scientific study. But for Kash Sunghuttee, a British man with Mauritian heritage, it’s much more complicated.
I was in Oxford, I went to the museum and I just thought, what the hell is this?” he says. Mr Sunghuttee’s disbelief stemmed from the fact that before dodos became extinct, they were native to Mauritius.
When you go to Mauritius, there’s a museum with a dodo in it, but it’s a fake dodo,” he says. “I thought, why does Oxford have the real dodo and Mauritius has the fake dodo? I was furious.
“Imagine that British bulldogs were extinct and the only existing soft tissue specimen of the British bulldog was in Mauritius, while the UK had a fake one.
English people would be on boats going there right now … It’s the principle of the thing. ”
So, how did these invaluable remains from a tiny island off the coast of Africa end up half a world away?
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