In the footsteps of the bone collectors: nineteenth-century cave exploration on Rodrigues Island, Indian Ocean

Abstract

For all of the nineteenth-century bone collectors working on Rodrigues, their main objective was to search the caves for specimens of the Solitaire Pezophaps solitaria, the sister taxon of the Dodo Raphus cucullatus of neighbouring Mauritius. Rodrigues Island has an extensive calcarenite plain in the southwest of the island, which contains numerous caves. A number of expeditions explored the area and excavated the caves, especially during the 1860s and 1870s, resulting in the discovery of thousands of subfossil bones. Some details of these activities were published, and some of the expedition explorers left manuscript reports, all of which provide clues as to where they were excavating. Here, we present the results of a modern attempt to reconstruct the movements of these expeditions and to discover which of the numerous caves were visited and excavated.