The white dodo of Réunion Island: unravelling a scientific and historical myth

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The supposed white dodo of Réunion Island (Indian Ocean) arose from a merging of travellers' tales of large whitish birds with some enigmatic paintings of white dodos painted in mid- to late- seventeenth-century Holland. Sub-fossil bone discoveries in the 1970s onwards revealed that the bird which travellers called a solitaire was a large, quasi-flightless ibis, while the Dutch paintings turn out to have been based on a much earlier picture by Roelant Savery of a whitish specimen of a Mauritius dodo (Raphus cucullatus), painted in Prague around 1611. Savery's dodo images impact on this story at various points and are discussed in detail. There are geological reasons for believing dodos, evolving in Mauritius, would have been already flightless before Réunion emerged and hence could not have colonised that more recent volcanic island. No contemporary images are known of the Réunion solitaire (the ibis, Threskiornis solitarius) and no specimens were brought to Europe alive or dead.