Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad, Strange Tale of the DodoThe Dodo went from being newly discovered to extinction in less than a hundred years. The flightless, odd-looking bird was seen for the first time by Europeans and then annihilated by Europeans in the course of the seventeenth century. And by the end of the nineteenth century, all that remained of what Portuguese explorers called the ¿crazy bird¿ was a patchwork of tall tales, contradictory reports, incompatible illustrations, and fragments of feather and bone. The dodo had become, in short, an unsolvable puzzle, but a puzzle that persisted in art, literature, and scientific speculation.|Best-selling author Clara Pinto-Correia, in following the bird¿s re-creation, shows in this remarkable book how the human intellect and the human imagination prey on sketchy facts and images, how missing pieces and incomplete lines are merged and fused to make a cohesive whole. By considering the incredibly strong hold of this bumbling, ungainly, and ill-fated creature on our collective scientific and literary imagination, Pinto-Correia teaches us not just about the ill-fated bird from the island paradise of Mauritius, but about our own abiding need to make sense of the world around us.|Clara Pinto-Correia is the author of the best-selling The Ovary of Eve. She has taught in the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; served as a research assistant at Harvard University in the Museum of Comparative Zoology; and is currently Professor and Director of the Masters Degree Program in Developmental Biology at the Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, Portugal. |
Other editions - View all
Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo Clara Pinto-Correia Limited preview - 2003 |
Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo Clara Pinto-Correia No preview available - 2010 |
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Affinities Amsterdam animals artists beak became Benham bird’s Bohemia bones Bontekoe Bourbon Buffon called Cape Clusius coast colony crazy bird creatures Cuvier Darwin depictions discovery Dodo Didus ineptus dodo of Mauritius dodo’s dodologists drawings Dutch earth East Edwin Strickland,The Dodo Emperor English Ernst Mayr Ernst Mayr Library Europe European exotic explorers Extinct Birds François Cauche François Leguat French Hapsburg Hoefnagel Hugh Edwin Strickland Hugh Edwin Strickland,The Huguenots Ibid Indian Ocean Índias Indies Islands Mauritius Jacob Jacob van Neck Joris Hoefnagel Kindred known land landscapes Linschoten live London Madagascar maps Maurice of Nassau Mauritius Mauritius dodo Museum Natural History naturalists Netherlands never organized Orpheus Osteology Owen painters paintings pigeons Pingré Portugal Portuguese Prague Protestant published Quesnes Reeve Réunion Rodrigues Rodriguez Roelandt Savery Rudolf sail sailors Savery’s ships sixteenth century solitaire species specimens studies things tion took turtles voyage white dodo wings