Stuff The British Stole · ABC Australia and CBC

Strange Fowle

·35 min·3 clips

Scientists discover the Oxford dodo was shot in the head, revealing a 17th-century murder.

Mark Fennell hosts this episode alongside Kash Sangadi, a Mauritian-British writer who brings a personal connection to the subject: the dodo is the national symbol of Mauritius, an island whose colonial history is inseparable from the bird's extinction. The central question is why the Oxford specimen — the only dodo in the world retaining soft tissue and therefore usable DNA — is held in England rather than returned to Mauritius. The investigation begins with the earliest known written record of a live dodo in England: a 1638 diary entry by Amon Lestrange describing a caged dodo at a London market being fed pebbles by its keeper. Lestrange's account is one of the few contemporaneous documents confirming live dodos were transported to Europe. The bird eventually passed into the collection of John Tradescant the Elder, a royal gardener who assembled what is considered the world's first public museum, known as the Ark, in Lambeth. After Tradescant's death the collection was controversially acquired by Elias Ashmole, who donated it to Oxford University, forming the basis of the Ashmolean Museum. The dodo specimen moved to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where it has been held since. Mark and Kash examine the repatriation question seriously — whether the specimen's path to Oxford constitutes a form of colonial theft that creates a moral obligation to return it. Their conclusion is nuanced: the chain of custody does not map cleanly onto the colonial extraction narratives that apply to objects like the Parthenon Marbles or Benin Bronzes. The scientific bombshell arrives near the end: CT scanning conducted at the University of Warwick in 2023 revealed multiple lead shot pellets lodged in the back of the dodo's skull, indicating the bird was shot in the head. The cause of death of the only dodo with surviving genetic material was a deliberate killing.

As heard by us

A dodo mystery that turns one strange object into a history of collecting.

An old skull in a Warwick lab opens into a dodo mystery that is equal parts investigation and oddity. The episode follows a specimen with preserved skin and DNA, then traces the thread back to a 1638 London sighting of a so-called strange fowl and the question of how a creature…

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A dodo, a skull, and a trail back to one of Britain's first public museums.

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