2024-03-23 17:46:42
On Thursday, March 14, the sound of a jackhammer echoed through the taxidermy workshop of Paris’ National Museum of Natural History. And yet, there was no visible renovation work on the gallery’s first floor. Nor on the other side of the basement windows opening onto the outside. In the room, two men were busy working. Holding a punch in his hand, the sculptor Camille Renversade was focused on the beak of a dodo that had already been feathered up. The taxidermist Vincent Cuisset was airbrushing the gorget of the still-bare second dodo waiting on a nearby table. This paint gun, its compressor and the associated blower, used to deeply color the feathers without having them stick, was the source of this assault on visitors’ ears. The taxidermist gestured to wait a moment. Just two minutes. Finally, he apologetically put down his instrument. A soft music, until then inaudible, filled the room: “It’s the home stretch. Yesterday, I finished at midnight. I’ve been at it since 6 am. We’re running late and there’s really no room for error.”
The dodo couple will be the “Alex Reed of honor” at the Gallery of Evolution’s 30th anniversary weekend on Saturday and Sunday. Shows, workshops, special tours and night visits will be on the program of this institution, which greeted over a million visitors in 2023. These will be just a few of the temporary celebrations on offer at this mecca for the popularization of science and the discovery of the richness of the living world. As for the dodos, they will remain at the entrance to the gallery of extinct species, where one of their cousins, sculpted in plaster in 1901, has long taken center stage. Renversade continued: “They’ll greet visitors with the same inquisitive gaze they’re said to have had when Portuguese and Dutch sailors landed on Mauritius. The dodos had never known predators, never seen humans. How might they imagine that we were going to exterminate them?”
Over the centuries, Raphus cucullatus, to give the dodo its scientific name, has become the ultimate symbol of species that have become extinct through the fault of humans. Why this bird when Sapiens has wiped out so many others? First, because there is no doubt regarding our responsibility in its case. And yet, its meat had a reputation for being mediocre. “The longer and oftener they were cooked, the less soft and more insipid eating they became,” Admiral Wybrand van Warwijck wrote in his 1598 travel diary. The Dutch even nicknamed the animal Walghvogel, the “disgusting bird.” But for starving sailors, who were sometimes reduced for weeks to a dry diet of rotten biscuits, being picky was not an option. More crucially, the ships had brought other visitors into their holds: cats, rats, pigs, and soon macaques. All these predators attacked the eggs laid on the ground and the younglings. The bird rapidly disappeared as a result, probably in the 1660s.
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