The Dodo … This unusual bird and it’s story have captivated me my hole life, since I was a little boy and I always wanted a skeleton for myself. I’m a maker of artisan science sculptures like dinosaur skulls or dodo bird skeletons.
Over the years a variety of private collectors and scientists and museums all over the world from Japan to the US, bought my Dodo replicas, like for example Ashley Hall from the museum of the Rockies in Montana got her Dodo sculpture from me (see my Instagram: PROARTCUT ).
Also the french Muséum de l’Ardèche - Fossiles et dinosaures in the beautiful town of Balazuc, is showing one of my Dodo sculptures in there exposition. Visit it! It’s wonderful with Kids, too: https://museum-ardeche.fr/
The one you will get after ordering is like the one in the photos, but because I build and paint them by hand, every one will be slightly different in detail.
It is a unique art piece, signed and dated under the base (of course with little felt pads). Made in and shipped from my studio in Germany with DHL Premium air shipping.
All real Dodo skeletons in museums and private collections today are composites made up from bones that belonged to several individual animals.
The only one dodo skeleton that is made up from the bones of a single animal was sold in 2016 for $430.000
The Dodo bird (lat.: Raphus Cucullatus) was a flightless bird and native to the island of Mauritius. The closest relatives to the dodo are pigeons and doves, but the dodo was much larger in size. The biggest found birds could be around 1m (36“ or 3 feet) tall and weighted about 18kg (2,857 stones or 40 lb). That was possible, because of the isolation of it’s habitat island without any natural predators, unfortunately that led also to their extinction. Humans ate the birds and brought rats and cats with them.
Known for their slightly comical appearance, a living bird was last seen on the island of Maritius in 1662, just 70 years after its discovery.
Dodos as a species are pretty significant and there bones are scattered across the globe in a number of museums, where people seek them out when they visit. But there is little known about how the bird really lived, how it moved, even the colour of its feathers are not really known anymore.
I worked for many years on this sculpture and had the privileged to have seen many museum pieces around the world. With the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I began to collect all knowledge I could find, to build my own Dodo skeleton.
I used the newest scientific publications, 3d Scans and castings from real bones for my work, that took me years to find and get.
My Dodo is a combination of the old style we see in museums with the new knowledge we have today about posture and bone structure.
Also it’s around 100 bones, I made the artistic decision not to have a 100% perfect skeleton and so - like the one in the museems around the earth - some bones are missing, as a symbol of what humanity lost due to the extinction of this species.
Most dodo bones in museums are brown, because they are mostly sub-fossils found in the Mare aux Songes (a swamp on Mauritius) that gave them they’re color. Because of that, I gave my Dodo sculpture the some familiar old weathered look.
The head with the neck is removable for easy shipping (see photos).
The height is 77cm / 30”. The round wooden base with 39 cm / 15,75” diameter is made from European hardwood (FSC certified) and you can get it in three different color variants.
The possible colors are (please see photos attached):
1. aged walnut brown (what you can see in the pictures)
2. ebonized black
3. natural oiled beechwood
Your Dodo bird skeleton will be made by order with only the best materials and art paints available. It´s a long process with multiple coats of oils, varnish and real chellac, that takes it time.
It will be shipped worldwide in a big box with lots of packing material.
By the way, the electric drill, banana, apples, chairs and tables in some of the pictures are just for size comparison. It’s a big bird, the hight of a dinner table.
For any questions, just write me here.
Best wishes
Timo
