![]() Top Image: The dodo as painted by Roelant. Harry's "ability as an observer is not the issue, he saw/ate a bird he was told by the locals was a 'dodo,' and naturally that's what he called it in his account this does not make him 'unreliable,'" Cheke wrote in an email.īut another scientist (and artist) who has studied the extinction of dodos, Julian Hume, said he believes that dodos went extinct by about 1690, and that Harry was certainly "no fool." However, it is "presumptuous for anyone to suggest what Harry did or did not see almost 350 years after the event," he added. The dodo is an unmistakable icon of extinction, a species squandered in near-time, but separating the animal from its modern mythology is an ongoing task. ![]() By the 1660s, Cheke said, dodos had already gone extinct on the main island of Mauritius, and the name "dodo" had been transferred to a similar flightless species now known as a red rail. However, independent ornithologist Anthony Cheke said that he wasn't swayed by the study and maintains that the last reliable sighting of dodos was indeed on an island off Mauritius in 1662. Bird expert Claire McSweeney travelled from Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire to Kansas to help keepers hand-rear the incredibly rare Guam kingfishers. The dodo's closest genetic relative was the also-extinct Rodrigues solitaire. "People didn't appreciate Harry was a great scientist, and his (dodo) observations shouldn't be dismissed," Jackson said. The dodo ( Raphus cucullatus) is an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, which is east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. That didn't stop Europeans from hunting the flightless bird to extinction (though introduced pigs and possibly other invasive species also played a role). Among the feathery beasts being feasted upon were dodos, whose flesh, he noted, was quite hard. Jackson came across these writings while looking at Harry's magnetic field work. Harry also took notes in 1681 about what birds were being eaten near Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean east of Africa, while his ship was docked in the area. Though Harry is little-known, he shouldn't be, Jackson said: Besides his important and detailed geomagnetic recordings, he made detailed drawings of the Great Comet of 1680, one of the brightest in recorded history, which could be seen even during daytime and with the naked eye, for about three months. ![]() This measurement helped to vindicate the idea that the planet had such a field emanating from deep underground, and helped give rise to the modern understanding of geomagnetism. In the course of looking at past geophysical measurements around the globe, Jackson ran across several writings by Benjamin Harry, a 17th-century British sailor and scientist who was the first person to measure the inclination, or angle, of the Earth's magnetic field in various spots in the Southern Hemisphere.
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