Near the egg stands a large bird, its head raised attentively, eyeing the visitor not with fear but with gawkish curiosity. The foreground is of dry tussock, clipped and trampled into a rudimentary nest which shelters a single egg, off-white and splotched with mauve and brown. Yet a poor Te Anau farmer’s exclamation on seeing the exhibit–“Why, them’s the birds we lived on all last winter!”–was just one of many persistent reports of takahe sightings in the early 1900s, all of which were hushed up or dismissed.īetween the laughing owl display and a cabinet with five glass-eyed kakapo, a circular window frames a painted backdrop of snowcapped Fiordland mountains. Last century, mountain skins for museum display was regarded as successful species preservation, and this specimen, which met its end 100 years ago at the mouth of a dog and has since resided in the Otago Museum, was long considered the last of its kind. The tiny Stephens Island wren, Auckland Islands merganser, New Zealand little bittern, Chatham Islands rail-all defunct. South Island kokako: missing, presumed dead. Huia, with its crescent-moon beak and faded orange wattles: died December 28, 1907. The thumb-sized bush wren: “Slipped away quietly in 1972.” New Zealand quail: “Died in 1869.” The South Island thrush, last seen in 1902. Each has a black-lettered epitaph explaining the time and circumstances of death. There is despair in this pose, the do-or-die abandon of a species making its last stand.Įlsewhere in this Madame Tussaud’s hall of faunal fame lie the less conspicuous and the less renowned-creatures that lacked teeth and claws, or a size that earned them notoriety. What is most striking is its stance: the back arched, the ears flattened, the mouth locked in the freeze-framed snarl of a cornered animal. Another glass cage houses a Tasmanian wolf-ivory-yellow of coat, banded brown across the hindquarters, its rat-like tail an anachronism for a creature that could otherwise pass for a streetwise but famished mongrel. One cabinet, lit in film noir style, preserves the memory of 11 moa, their skeletons wired together from bones discovered in caves and swamps. Here, arranged with the methodical tidiness of a cemetery, is a record of evolution’s casualties: a menagerie of the dead and the has-beens, whose insular world changed faster than they could follow. On the Fourth Floor of Dunedin’s Otago Museum, above the display of ships and ocean voyages, lies a sombre animal mausoleum-a gallery of extinction. A century later they were extinct.Written by Derek Grzelewski Photographed by Rod Morris Their rotund bodies proved too tasty and easy pickings for the waves of sailors that followed. In 1507, Portuguese ships slipped into the island’s harbor, which was the beginning of the end for the odd-looking bird. It had no natural predators on the island and was flightless. The dodo ( Raphus cucullatus) resided on the island of Mauritius, its only home, off the southeast corner of Africa, where it roamed around likely grazing on fruits and nuts or plucking marine invertebrates from the surf. The findings are published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. However, new research suggests that the dodo was actually quite intelligent, bringing some vindication to the hapless bird. The dodo, the flightless island bird with a bulbous beak and portly frame, has been immortalized in popular culture since its disappearance from nature some three hundred years ago-albeit as a symbol of extinction, obsolescence, and stupidity (think the animated movie Ice Age, where, in a span of about 3 minutes, the film manages to transform the whole species into a punchline). A model that will be displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in a new exhibit highlighting the connection between dinosaurs and birds.
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