Re: Dodo
Posted by: jasper (---.server.ntl.com)
Date: September 20, 2001 12:23PM
<HTML>You are oh-so-right. Whenever I am in an unfamiliar city with a decent natural history museum, I like to go and see whether they have a dodo or thylacine, gliptodon, moa, great auk, etc, etc. I was in Edinburgh on a signing a few months back, I left the grown-ups on some weak excuse and went to the most excellent Edinburgh museum. All the extinctees were there (minus the gliptodon) and yes, you've guessed it, there was the sleekest, fastest, cap-on-backwards lowrunner of a dodo I have ever seen. This was a modern construction and had been built using all the most up-to-date technologies relating to skeletal density and body mass, so your theory has a great deal of validity. Also on the subject, Naturalists have conjectured that the dodo might have gorged itself in the summer season so it could survive the leaner months on Mauritius. These ''seasonal gluttons' might have been the dodos sketched in the early years and promulgated the idea of the bird as an odd-looking porky gutbucket and not the lean, mean, plocking machine that I -and Thursday, of course - have come to love.
- Jasper Fforde</HTML>