Captured, fed with meat, grown fat: the version of the dodo shown at the top far right is the origin of our utterly inaccurate view of him. | Image: Oliver Hoop

We have before us an astonishingly diverse parade of dodos. The Raphus cucullatus puffing itself up at the top right is colourful and fat, whereas its honey-brown, slender cousin struts along two images further to the left. And yet all these images are of the same species of pigeon from Mauritius that became extinct in 1690. “It’s like a game of Chinese whispers”, says the graphic designer Oliver Hoop. “The mistakes made early on became ever more exaggerated from one drawing to the next”. He lined up these different images of the dodo – all of them dating from between the 17^th and 19^th centuries – as part of his Bachelor thesis in artistic research.

Dodos Nos. 2 and 3 in the top row are paintings of live birds that were kept in large menageries where they had enough room to wander about. Hoop identifies the top-right variant, painted by the Dutchman Roelant Savery, as the ‘forefather’ of all the false depictions. “According to the sources, this dodo lived in a cage on a ship. It was probably sick and had fatty liver disease because he was presumably also fed with meat”. It had become deformed, says Hoop. “You can also see that in its very crooked neck”.

This clumsy-looking dodo, painted by Savery in 1626, subsequently shaped our image of this extinct, flightless bird. The drawing on the bottom far left is a copy of it, and all the images to the right of it are copies of this copy. “It seems as if each artist gave free rein to their creativity in turn”, says Hoop. “They probably thought: ‘There are so many different versions, I may as well make my own now’”. Savery’s painting was essentially ‘fake news’ that went viral long before the concept existed.

This uncontrolled copying process is problematic for research today. “Because of this – and because we only have two or three examples of a bird that has been preserved – the dodo has become a mystery, rather like the dinosaurs”. Hoop says that this case “shows why scientific illustrators have to be so meticulous”. During his studies at the Zurich University of the Arts, Hoop was given the nickname ‘the dodo guy’. And since then, he’s continued to work on reconstructions of this Mauritian bird, with help from AI and 3D printers. May the parade of the dodo become even more diverse in future!

Image: Oliver Hoop