Jean-Raymond Boulle Corporations: Omnicane, Dodo Discoveries World Heritage Site?

Game Old Bird
Dodo research is alive and well in Mauritius,
says Padma Rao Sundarji
Christian Foo Kune, owner of the palatial sugar estate Mon Trésor Mon Désert, catches his breath as he opens a gigantic safe in his office. We are in the midst of verdant canefields and blackened marshes lapped by an emerald Mauritian sea. I expect Foo Kune’s profits from sugarcane—one of Mauritius’ main sources of income—to tumble out. Instead, I see rows and rows of neatly stacked plastic tubs. They contain old bones, nestled in cottonwool and paraffin.

"These were found accidentally by archaeologists in a marsh called Mare aux Songes here on my estate," says the ruddy-cheeked planter, reverently fondling the fossils as though they belonged to a blue-blooded ancestor. "You should have seen them—they were like children opening a toy box."

As Foo Kune leads me into an airconditioned room where dozens of rows of more plastic tubs lie, his excitement is infectious, not grisly.

For, here lie the remains of an ‘entire eco-system’—flora and fauna estimated to be at least 3,000 to 6,000 years old and soon expected to unravel one of anthropology’s greatest mysteries: whether man’s rapaciousness may have wiped out entire eco-systems, particularly the dodo, Mauritius’ mysterious, national icon that has been extinct for the past 300 years.

A couple of years ago, Dutch geographer Kenneth Rijsdijk of the Netherlands’ Natural History Museum and a colleague had been excavating at an old Dutch fort near Mare aux Songes. They wanted to learn how their colonising forefathers had lived on this island, and whether their voracious appetites had really been responsible for causing the extinction of the dodo, as is commonly believed. Amidst shards of pottery and dinnerware, they found bones of domestic animals like pigs and chickens that had formed the meals of their ancestors. But there were none of the dodo.

Their curiosity was aroused. They knew that the few, fragmented bones of the big, flightless bird that had been pieced together for exhibits in museums around the world, had all been found on the nearby Mare aux Songes, so they side-stepped to pay a visit. Foo Kune was warm and welcoming but all he had to show them was soil from earlier ‘coring samples’ made by a Japanese researcher who later abandoned the project.

A first, peremptory examination of the contents, and the Dutchmen could barely contain their excitement. The mud was replete with tiny fragments of bones, seeds and fossils, indicating that much more lay beneath the layers of peat, rock and slush at Mare aux Songes.

In June 2006, Rijsdijk and a team of researchers from various disciplines— palaeontologists, botanists and DNA experts—hurried back from the Netherlands. This time, they headed straight for Foo Kune’s estate. After an initial radar imaging of the area, they expected to stay put for months. But their excavation lasted barely three days. Giant landmovers quickly brought up huge quantities of all kinds of bones, seeds and fossils, the minutest of which were then graded by sieves.

There were entire, complete shields of giant tortoises (Cylandrispis sp.), bones of red-white-blue ‘Dutch’ pigeons and of the flightless Mauritian red rail. There were also the beak and bones of one of the world’s largest parrots, Lophopsittacus mauritianus, bones of the giant skink Didosaurus and of fruit bats. And most of all, there were hundreds of bones of dodos—including a rare, complete dodo beak and an ‘articulated’ leg—that is, the femur, fibula, tibiotarsus and hypotarsus—of one, individual bird.

But these were not the bones of animals that had been eaten by man. Instead, the unusually large collection all found at one spot, indicated to the researchers that the animals must have congregated at an ancient, watering hole when a sudden, natural disaster—like the cyclones that Mauritius is particularly prone to even today—struck, burying them alive.

"These are only the second such finds in the history of dodo research," says Kenneth Rijsdijk. "And the peaty soil in the marsh ensured that the quality of the bones remained excellent over thousands of years." The Dutch geographer is equally excited about the other animal and bird fossils as well as the scores of seeds of extinct trees like the native tambalacoque and ebony. The former is called the ‘dodo’ tree because it was believed that the hard seeds had to be eaten by the dodo and softened by its digestive juices, in order to germinate. When the dodo died, the tambalacoque is said to have died with it. There are very few tambalacoques left in Mauritius, and certainly none at Mare aux Songes.

"Up to now, DNA researchers were largely dependent on museum fossils which were not ideally preserved," says Rijsdijk. "With this find, we will be able to minutely examine how humans invaded this pristine island and damaged its ecology and animals without realising it."

Raphus cucullatus was initially named the dodo, Portuguese for ‘stupid’, by Portuguese sailors who anchored off the uninhabited island of Mauritius in the early 1500s, but did not go ashore.

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