the first fossil of the dodo bird?

Question

when was it found?
by who?

Answer 1

Dr. Julian Hume of London's Natural History Museum was the first to uncover and fully describe a nearly complete skeleton of a dodo. This occurred last summer, in 2006.

Previous to this, the dodo was only known from eyewitness accounts recorded by Dutch settlers and sailors on the island of Mauritius (where the dodo lived). There was a preserved skeleton stored in a museum in Oxford, England, but it was destroyed in a fire back in 1755.

There had been dodo bones collected on the island before that time - but they were fragmentary, incomplete, and collected without bothering about their stratigraphic association, adjacent fossils, or preservational environment.

Because the dodos were living animals when they were discovered, no one thought to preserve any of them for future reference. When they went extinct in the 17th century, there were no real records kept.

Islands, especially tropical islands and forest ecosystems tend not to be very good locations for the kinds of conditions which lead to preservation of material as fossils. The bodies and skeletons tend to be broken down and destroyed by rain, acid soils and bugs before they can be buried and preserved.

Until now, basically everything we knew about dodos was from the rather sketchy and possibly inaccurate notes of those settlers and sailors who happened to write about them, and a handful of sketches made by amateur naturalists while they were alive.

Answer 2

I don't think any fossils of dodos have been found. They are known from bones and skins collected by sailors and explorers but these bones are not fossilised. Fossilisation is a slow process in which the tissue is replaced by rock under precise but uncommon conditions. Fossils are made of rock, often silica, not bone