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Feature: Dead dodo earns collector more than 400,000 USD

Xinhua, November 23, 2016 Adjust font size:

An extinct flightless bird remembered only for the famous saying -- as dead as a dodo -- has taken pride of place at an auction house in southern England.

An almost complete skeleton of the dodo, extinct since the 1600s, was sold Tuesday for more than 400,000 U.S. dollars.

The dodo was entered into the sale at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, West Sussex, by an unnamed individual. He had painstakingly spent 40 years collecting dodo bones until he had virtually enough to build a complete skeleton.

Since the 1970s he had carefully assembled the dodo like a giant jigsaw, completing the task just a few years ago. Now it has gone to a private collector after a flurry of interest in the rare bird.

The bird was only found in Mauritius and measured around one meter in height.

The famous English children's writer Lewis Carroll featured a dodo as a character in his 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Experts believe that because the dodo lived in isolation it was fearless and its inability to fly made it easy prey for visiting sailors and animals such as dogs.

The auction house said the dodo had been sold for 430,662 U.S. dollars to a private collector.

It was described as 95 percent complete, made up mainly of bones recovered from a swamp in south-eastern Mauritius and said to be the first to be put together since the early 20th Century.

The only existing dodo skeleton made up of the bones of a single animal is on display in Port Louis, Mauritius. A handful of others, made up of collected bones, are all owned by museums across the world. In recent years, the Mauritian government has banned all exports of dodo bones.

Auction house director Rupert van der Werff said: "The rarity and completeness of this specimen cannot be overemphasised."

Errol Fuller, natural history curator at Summers Place Auctions, said the piece was an "amazingly rare" example of "one of the great icons of extinction".

Although the dodo is extinct there are millions of its closest living relatives, the pigeon. Endit