The Dodo Blog

The dodos drink too! Ok, they don’t (didn’t), but they are they are in the logo of a beer from Réunion Bière Bourbon, also known as “La Dodo”. It’s a “blonde beer” (sorry if I’m wrong but I don’t know about beers, specially in English) produced and commercialized in Réunion by Bourbon breweries, where it’s the first product, the most known and the most bribed. Bière Bourbon has this nick/ surname, La Dodo, in reference to the bird from Mauritius island which is extinct and appears in the logo, as a smiling dodo. (From the Wikipedia article, and sorry about any problems on this translation)

From the English article:

The Brasseries de Bourbon (“Breweries of Bourbon”) is the only major producer of beer on Réunion Island, a French oversea department in the Indian Ocean formerly known as Bourbon Island.

The group was founded in 1962. The first product of the brasseries, and by far now their most sold and widely known, is the blonde lager Dodo, named after the now extinct bird (its official name is simply “Bourbon”). This beer is widely known because of its emblem of a smiling dodo, and the creole slogan La dodo lé la (The Dodo is here!), both displayed in colourful wall paintings on shops, snacks etc. selling the beer.

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Primeval is a British science fiction drama television programme produced by Impossible Pictures for ITV. [...] The series follows a team of scientists who investigate anomalies in time and deal with the ancient creatures that come through, although they are not always prehistoric. The fantastic creatures on the Episode 4 of the series are Dodos!

The Dodos created for this episode are super cute and for a while you can almost forget they aren’t real. The series production did a great work “recreating” an animal that few people saw and that we have few registries. Remember that almost all those old paintings of dodos were made after the dodos were already extinct. Super cute dodos, but The dodos were depicted as fat and clumsy, as those bought to by sailors for zoos were due to overfeeding in captivity; real wild dodos would have been somewhat slimmer than shown in the show. That means the dodos of the episode are based on dodo paintings made in Europe.

There is a video excerpt of that Primeval episode with scenes with those dodos on YouTube. The video quality isn’t the best, but it worth. Bellow, the video and more dodo images from that episode.

Update: the original video was removed, but for you keep enjoying the dodos, I updated the embed bellow with the BBC‘s excerpt (3:46min) of that episode.

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Occasionally the neanderthal would go off and paint. That’s a carved wood dodo bird in the foreground.

Dodo bird as religious icon.

The Dodo bird as religious icon are from the set Jesus Reads to A Neanderthal by Daren Rabinovich (I think) at the Low Gallery, photographed by Christina.

From the The Mauritius Post Ltd: An Official First Day Cover is an envelope which the post office puts on sale on the first day of an issue. The stamp or stamps are cancelled with a special cachet. And the latest First Day Cover (FDC) is The Dodo above.

This set of postage stamps/ souvenir sheet issued by the Mauritius Post Ltd portrays different representations of the Dodo through drawings and paintings of various artists at different times.

Rs5 Journal of the Gelderland, 1601
An important contribution to the early eye-witness accounts of the Dodo are the drawings found in the Journal of Admiral Wolfert Harmenszoon, who commanded the second Dutch fleet of five ships to visit Mauritius in 1601. The flagship of this expedition was the Gelderland which was one of the original ships to call into Mauritius with Vice-Admiral Warwyck in 1598. The Gelderland Journal is particularly valuable as it includes four drawings of living Dodos, and one drawing of a dead one.

Rs10 Adrian Van de Venne, 1626
This pen drawing by Adrian Van de Venne of a rather fat looking Dodo was drawn around 1626, and it can be found in the Library at the University of Utrecht, Holland. It is probable that this image was modelled from a crudely stuffed bird, or even copied from some other artist, which led to exaggerations of one painter to another.

Rs15 Harrison, 1798
This painting appeared in a publication by Harrison, Cluse and Co., of No. 78, Fleet Street, London, in 1798. It seems to have been copied from one of the best known Savery pictures which was presented to the Natural History Museum, London in 1759.

Rs25 J.W. Frohawk, 1905
This chromolithograph by J.W. Frohawk is taken from Lord Walter Rothschild’s Extinct Birds which was published in 1907. The same artist painted a number of pictures for the same publication. Lord Walter Rothschild came from a family of rich bankers but his consuming interest was in ornithology and extinct birds in particular.

Rs25 Souvenir Sheet by Julian Pender Hume
Julian Pender Hume is a Palaeontologist by profession which enables him to bring accuracy to his artistic impressions of extinct animals. His painting showing a reconstruction of endemic fauna of Mauritius has been reproduced on the Souvenir Sheet.

First Day Cover Illustration
The illustration on the First Day Cover is a reproduction of the Dodo’s head from a bronze statue situated at Ile aux Aigrettes.

Ok, now I’m desperate. Does any one have an idea of how can I get those stamps and the FDC envelope? Do I have any readers in Mauritius? Any suggestions? *Sigh*

Update: I think I’ve discovered a way to buy them on the on-line shop of the Philatelic Products. I just need to discover how much will cost me the international transfer from bank in Brazil to Mauritius. *Ouch*

awk, Jim lad. by Drew Northcott: I love dodos. Their latin name is “Didus Ineptus” which is a joyful thing. I work in the games industry, and I try to sneak a dodo in to anything I work on these days. (my last game had a dodo shaped level). Anyhow earlier in the year we were talking about a game involving pirate dodos, so here is one.

PS.: Due to technical problems on this blog – many of you may have notice – we weren’t able to celebrate the International Talk Like a Pirate Day with this great pirate dodo illustration. I hope that in some place of the world isn’t September 20th yet, because this is late dodo celebration. Check the
Talk Like a Pirate Day 2007 at Bibi’s box.

Dodo Cromo from Nacional de Chocolates by Mauricio Giraldo.

I’m usually against animated gifs, but that one is too good to ignore. The image above is from the Geocities site Dodo WEB. The site has some known information about the birds, the origin of their name, the sad history about their extinction, images and links – almost all broken. Well, it’s an old site about dodos, and that’s why we can’t judge it. The best part of it are the original dodo illustrations, like the one above.

Update: Dodo WEB page is dead, as all the other Geocities pages. But, you can still check it on the wonderful Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

The Last Dodo is a BBC Books original novel written by Jacqueline Rayner and based on the long running science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones. It was published on 19 April 2007, after the television debut of companion Martha Jones, alongside Sting of the Zygons, and Wooden Heart.

Description from the BBC Shop:

After a trip to the zoo, the Doctor and Martha go in search of a real live dodo, and are transported by the TARDIS to the mysterious Museum of the Last Ones. There, in the Earth section, they discover every extinct creature up the the present day – billions of them, from the tiniest insect to the biggest dinosaur, all still alive and in suspended animation.

Preservation is the Museum’s only job – collecting the last of every endangered species from all over the universe. And for millenia the Museum has been trying to trace one elusive specimen: the last of the Time Lords.

Featuring the Doctor and Martha as played by David Tennant and Freema Agyeman in the hit series.

Statue of a mauriciuszi dodo (Raphus cucullatus), from the site of birds by the Hungarian ecologist, parasitologist and writer Rózsa Lajos. I don’t speak the language, but I think that “Dodofélék” means “Dodo Bird” according to the site.

The vintage cover of this When the Do-Do Bird is Singing in the Coca-Cola Tree vintage sheet music for piano was kindly uploaded by Jerub Baal. (Thanks Pita!)