The dodo was wiped out shortly after Dutch and Portuguese sailors arrived on Mauritius in the sixteenth century. But it wasn't until Lewis Carroll's classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that this strange-looking bird, shown here as it appeared in the frontispiece to Richard Owen's Memoir on the Dodo in 1866, gripped the public imagination. Erroll Fuller's Dodo: From Extinction to Icon (HarperCollins, £16.99) provides details of the dodo's natural history, behaviour and extinction, and tells how it became an icon for all things that have been lost forever.
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Gone but not forgotten. Nature 421, 213 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/421213b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/421213b