The dodo was a flightless bird, first encountered by Europeans in the late 16th century on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. These birds were about a metre tall and weighed about 20kg. They lived on fruit and nested on the ground.
Today, what remains of the original specimen is the skull with left side of skin, the sclerotic ring from the eye, the skeleton of the foot, the sectioned femur, a feather (removed from the head in 1986) and various tissue samples taken over the years.
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The Museum also holds two of the most famous paintings of dodos: a copy of George Edwards' colourful 1758 depiction and Jan Savery's 1651 image of a plumper dodo. It is now thought that dodos would have been slimmer than they have typically been depicted.
The dodo exhibit was beloved by visitors. While working in the galleries, I often saw group after group of kids run through the Connecticut Bird Hall to point and laugh at this model. Little did they know that Peabody ornithologists had no better opinion of it than they did. Recent research on two almost complete skeletons, in South Africa and Mauritius, has changed the thinking about what this bird might have looked like. Traditionally depicted as a gigantic butterball turkey, the dodo is now thought to have been much slimmer, about twenty pounds lighter.
These casts of the Oxford head and foot are the only soft tissue references in existence. As can be seen, they are clearly not lifelike. Still, we often referred to them to get the right placement of details such as the nostril and ears. The casts picked up the nubs left by the feathers, which indicated location of feathers on the hood and parts of the face. The foot was somewhat problematic because, from my experience skinning birds, the toes of the cast are much fatter than what I believe the smallish bones from our scanned skeleton would support. It was determined later that the plaster cast foot is of a male (our skeleton is a female) There is a significant size difference between the sexes. This is seen in the foot. The cast still gave me a good idea about the size and patterns of scales on the legs and toes.
In January 2019 Kristof asked Leon Claessens, an ornithologist who has studied the Durban dodo, for his 3D scan of the specimen. It took a while. He was in the middle of moving to the Netherlands to take a position at Maastricht University and COVID-19 challenges slowed the process further. After permission was granted from the Durban Museum, we received the 3D files in June 2020.
Life got weird at this point. Retirement was a couple of months away, but after negotiating to rent our house for two months beyond the end of our lease, the landlady changed her mind and wanted us to be out by the end of May. There was no way to rent someplace for two months in Connecticut, so we moved earlier than expected to our family farm in western New York State. I cleaned a 600 square foot barn at our new home. I installed electricity and lights to use it as a new studio. I set up a table and a vise and moved the dodo to Western NY state.
Sculpting, molding, and casting the legs, feet and head had to take place before the final step-putting the feathered cape over the body. I used wax to produce a the smooth surface for the beak and I added clay onto the skull to create a first draft of the face.
I started the legs and feet at the same time. The toes were sculpted (as indicated by the bones) as less bulky and more feminine than in the plaster cast of the London specimen. I deferred to those plaster plaster casts for the scale patterns.
The small scales were made with balls of clay pressed onto the leg. The scales were finished by putting lightweight plastic sheeting over them and smoothing around each with a small dental tool. This was the same technique I used on the (much larger) scales of the Torosaurus. Once the legs were covered with scales, I made a silicone rubber mold. Casting was a bit more complicated. I first cast the larger scales in clear epoxy and then used a colored Elvax (hot melt glue) for the full leg. The process of casting Elvax is further complicated by having to heat the mold without burning or distorting the epoxy already cast into the mold and then squeezing the mold together over the threaded support rod while the Elvax was still hot!
The Oxford skull was close in size to the Durban skull, so this made it an appropriate choice. Michael knew of a CT scan of the Oxford skull freely available for non-commercial use. He segmented the skull elements from the scan data and digitally converted these regions to 3D mesh files. These extracted raw meshes were then cleaned up with 3D modeling software with a minor reconstruction of one of the quadrate bones that was broken. To complete the skull, a new scleral ring for the left eye was added by flipping this element from the opposite side. The cleaned meshes were then merged together into a single file of the complete skull and mandible that could be sent to Collin to be 3D printed. I was astonished that within ten days, I had an accurate, high-resolution print of the skull and mandible with every bone of the skull, fully reconstructed.
Again, the 3D print was too heavy to use. I had to make another mold and pour a foam cast. Within two weeks, I had another draft of the face. I sent Michael photographs and, while he was much happier with the overall look, he wanted several more changes. Some of these changes I could confidently do by myself, others called for a one-on-one meeting together with the model in front of us. I spontaneously put the dodo, clay face and all, into the car and drove to New Haven.
Michael is a talented artist. At this point, I asked him if he wanted to take over and sculpt the face to his liking. He spent the next couple of hours doing just that! I must say, this was the first time ever for me to have a researcher doing the actual sculpting. It was good for me to see how my biases can sneak into my sculpting. I had to let go of the idea that I could manipulate how the public might interpret the model and let science, references-and the researcher!-lead the way.
Now, knowing the clay face was how Michael wanted, I made a rubber mold and cast the face in Elvax. The first beak had to be sanded smooth of any texture and remolded. I would add the flakiness to the edges of the beak later.
The legs were painted extrinsically, as was the face. The feathers would have to be colored as well after they were added to the model. I, therefore, wanted the soft tissue to resemble the final condition as much as possible, to show how much color the feathers would need when seen together with the legs.
I contacted Ray Pupedis,the Entomology collection manager, and he suggested I get the model into a freezer. The only freezer I know that gets cold enough to kill pests is at the Peabody Museum. So I loaded the dodo into my car again and made an impromptu trip to the Peabody Museum.
I only had a couple of things to finish up. I added the final tiny feathers around the face to soften the edges of the feathers as they transition to the face. These feathers were cut to the 2-3 mm range and all of them had to be glued and put in place with forceps.
After I formally retired, I negotiated for four more months to wrap up this project. I thought this was more than double the amount of time I needed to finish. As it turned out, I needed every one of those four months.
The process behind the creation of the Dodo model began on paper. Hatfield first sketched the bird, using many references. He then took the concept to Pixologic ZBrush, where he digitally sculpted the Dodo model, which is comparable to sculpting with clay in real life. After many iterations, he had a detailed model that was ready to paint. He painted it in ZBrush much like one would paint a figurine. After a series of revisions, he worked the model into its final detailed state.
The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) is an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, which is east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The dodo's closest relative was the also-extinct and flightless Rodrigues solitaire. The two formed the subfamily Raphinae, a clade of extinct flightless birds that were a part of the family which includes pigeons and doves. The closest living relative of the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon. A white dodo was once thought to have existed on the nearby island of Runion, but it is now believed that this assumption was merely confusion based on the also-extinct Runion ibis and paintings of white dodos.
The first recorded mention of the dodo was by Dutch sailors in 1598. In the following years, the bird was hunted by sailors and invasive species, while its habitat was being destroyed. The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662. Its extinction was not immediately noticed, and some considered the bird to be a myth. In the 19th century, research was conducted on a small quantity of remains of four specimens that had been brought to Europe in the early 17th century. Among these is a dried head, the only soft tissue of the dodo that remains today. Since then, a large amount of subfossil material has been collected on Mauritius, mostly from the Mare aux Songes swamp. The extinction of the dodo within less than a century of its discovery called attention to the previously unrecognised problem of human involvement in the disappearance of entire species. The dodo achieved widespread recognition from its role in the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and it has since become a fixture in popular culture, often as a symbol of extinction and obsolescence.
The dodo was variously declared a small ostrich, a rail, an albatross, or a vulture, by early scientists.[3] In 1842, Danish zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhardt proposed that dodos were ground pigeons, based on studies of a dodo skull he had discovered in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. This view was met with ridicule, but was later supported by English naturalists Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Melville in their 1848 monograph The Dodo and Its Kindred, which attempted to separate myth from reality.[4][5] After dissecting the preserved head and foot of the specimen at the Oxford University Museum and comparing it with the few remains then available of the extinct Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), they concluded that the two were closely related. Strickland stated that although not identical, these birds shared many distinguishing features of the leg bones, otherwise known only in pigeons.[6] 152ee80cbc
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