This was strangely coincidental because 1693 was the very year that the Dodo is thought to have gone extinct. Sadly, it meant that he couldn't put his descriptive writing to work on the solitaire ...

Museum director Prof Paul Smith said it was "a really great surprise" to learn lead pellets had been found embedded in the skin and the bone of the dodo, which he described as an "icon of extinction".

Well versed in natural history, particularly geology and ornithology, Hugh Edwin Strickland (1811–53) became fascinated by the dodo and mankind's influence on its extinction. Seeking to investigate ...