Game old bird

Christian Foo Kune, owner of the palatial sugar estate Mon Tr&eacutesor Mon D&eacutesert, catches his breath as he opens a gigantic safe in his office. We are in the midst of verdant canefields and blackened marshes lapped by an emerald Mauritian sea. I expect Foo Kune&rsquos profits from sugarcane&mdashone of Mauritius&rsquo main sources of income&mdashto tumble out. Instead, I see rows and rows of neatly stacked plastic tubs. They contain old bones, nestled in cottonwool and paraffin.

""These were found accidentally by archaeologists in a marsh called Mare aux Songes here on my estate,"" says the ruddy-cheeked planter, reverently fondling the fossils as though they belonged to a blue-blooded ancestor. ""You should have seen them&mdashthey were like children opening a toy box.""

As Foo Kune leads me into an airconditioned room where dozens of rows of more plastic tubs lie, his excitement is infectious, not grisly.

For, here lie the remains of an &lsquoentire eco-system&rsquo&mdashflora and fauna estimated to be at least 3,000 to 6,000 years old and soon expected to unravel one of anthropology&rsquos greatest mysteries whether man&rsquos rapaciousness may have wiped out entire eco-systems, particularly the dodo, Mauritius&rsquo mysterious, national icon that has been extinct for the past 300 years.

A couple of years ago, Dutch geographer Kenneth Rijsdijk of the Netherlands&rsquo Natural History Museum and a colleague had been excavating at an old Dutch fort near Mare aux Songes. They wanted to learn how their colonising forefathers had lived on this island, and whether their voracious appetites had really been responsible for causing the extinction of the dodo, as is commonly believed. Amidst shards of pottery and dinnerware, they found bones of domestic animals like pigs and chickens that had formed the meals of their ancestors. But there were none of the dodo.

Their curiosity was aroused. They knew that the few, fragmented bones of the big, flightless bird that had been pieced together for exhibits in museums around the world, had all been found on the nearby Mare aux Songes, so they side-stepped to pay a visit. Foo Kune was warm and welcoming but all he had to show them was soil from earlier &lsquocoring samples&rsquo made by a Japanese researcher who later abandoned the project.

A first, peremptory examination of the contents, and the Dutchmen could barely contain their excitement. The mud was replete with tiny fragments of bones, seeds and fossils, indicating that much more lay beneath the layers of peat, rock and slush at Mare aux Songes.

In June 2006, Rijsdijk and a team of researchers from various disciplines&mdash palaeontologists, botanists and DNA experts&mdashhurried back from the Netherlands. This time, they headed straight for Foo Kune&rsquos estate. After an initial radar imaging of the area, they expected to stay put for months. But their excavation lasted barely three days. Giant landmovers quickly brought up huge quantities of all kinds of bones, seeds and fossils, the minutest of which were then graded by sieves.

There were entire, complete shields of giant tortoises (Cylandrispis sp.), bones of red-white-blue &lsquoDutch&rsquo pigeons and of the flightless Mauritian red rail. There were also the beak and bones of one of the world&rsquos largest parrots, Lophopsittacus mauritianus, bones of the giant skink Didosaurus and of fruit bats. And most of all, there were hundreds of bones of dodos&mdashincluding a rare, complete dodo beak and an &lsquoarticulated&rsquo leg&mdashthat is, the femur, fibula, tibiotarsus and hypotarsus&mdashof one, individual bird.

But these were not the bones of animals that had been eaten by man. Instead, the unusually large collection all found at one spot, indicated to the researchers that the animals must have congregated at an ancient, watering hole when a sudden, natural disaster&mdashlike the cyclones that Mauritius is particularly prone to even today&mdashstruck, burying them alive.

""These are only the second such finds in the history of dodo research,"" says Kenneth Rijsdijk. ""And the peaty soil in the marsh ensured that the quality of the bones remained excellent over thousands of years."" The Dutch geographer is equally excited about the other animal and bird fossils as well as the scores of seeds of extinct trees like the native tambalacoque and ebony. The former is called the &lsquododo&rsquo tree because it was believed that the hard seeds had to be eaten by the dodo and softened by its digestive juices, in order to germinate. When the dodo died, the tambalacoque is said to have died with it. There are very few tambalacoques left in Mauritius, and certainly none at Mare aux Songes.

""Up to now, DNA researchers were largely dependent on museum fossils which were not ideally preserved,"" says Rijsdijk. ""With this find, we will be able to minutely examine how humans invaded this pristine island and damaged its ecology and animals without realising it.""

Raphus cucullatus was initially named the dodo, Portuguese for &lsquostupid&rsquo, by Portuguese sailors who anchored off the uninhabited island of Mauritius in the early 1500s, but did not go ashore.

From the graceful Nicobar pigeon that still inhabits the islands of that name 5,000km away, to the fat, ungainly dodo in Mauritius, a long, eventful flight of evolution is believed to have taken place 43 million years ago. The pigeon is said to have flown across low-lying lands from southern India to Mauritius, a lush, uninhabited island, where an easy availability of nuts, seeds and fruits and a lack of predators gradually made the bird grow fat and lose its power of flight. When man&mdashthe Dutch&mdasharrived to first inhabit the island&mdashthe dodoaers&mdashor bird with a fat behind, as they called it disparagingly&mdashwas easy prey.

""Great quantities of fowls....twice as big as swans...loathsome birds,"" wrote an early Dutch settler in 1599. ""We beat them to death with sticks because there were no other inhabitants so neither were they afraid of us,"" wrote another in 1601. The early, needy sailors did eat the dodo but latter day Dutchmen began to refer to it as the Walghvogel&mdashthe bird whose meat makes one want to gag.

Over the three decades they stayed in Mauritius before the island was taken over by France, the Dutch certainly enjoyed tastier meats, including giant tortoise, but many slaves who ran away from their masters to hide in mountain caves continued to kill and eat the dodo for survival. The only articulated dodo skeleton in the world that was found before the recent, sensational find at Mare aux Songes was discovered in one such hide-out near hilly Port Louis and forms an exhibit at a museum in the Mauritian capital today.

Introduced fauna, including pigs, but also black rats that ran ashore from the ships and macaque monkeys brought in as pets from Indonesia, further contributed to the extinction of the dodo by stealing its eggs from the nests that it wove on the ground. But Kenneth Rijsdijk&rsquos finds of July 2006 prove for the first time, that natural catastrophes may have killed off large numbers of dodo well before man arrived on the island merely 500 years ago.

The last dodo was sighted in 1683, but more than 400 years after its extinction, Raphus cucullatus is a treasured and somewhat kitschy icon for the tiny state of Mauritius on keychains, coffee mugs, T-shirts, even on bikinis.

Sugar planter and passionate dodo-fan Christian Foo Kune hopes to open a dodo conservation park around the mammoth marsh, based upon the findings of the Dutch excavations.

Will there be at least one live dodo in the park, a cloned version of the bird Rijsdijk&rsquos team itself says that the level of current DNA technology is inadequate. But unlike what their ancestors thought of the dodo, they don&rsquot think it is such a dumb question. ""Look at the last 100 years,"" points out Rijsdijk. ""What is science fiction today may well be reality tomorrow.""

(The author is Southasia Bureau Chief of Der Spiegel, where a version of this story first appeared last year.)