Staff at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London were surprised to discover remains of the extinct bird amid a mass of crocodile bones during the move to the museum's new home (Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, 21 February 2011). The half-Dodo turned up in an Edwardian wooden box within a drawer at one of Britain's oldest natural history collections. Not much surprises the staff at the Grant Museum, where the contents include an old sweet jar full to the brim with pickled baby moles, their paws pressed pathetically against the glass, and the skull and antlers of an extinct species of giant deer which some academics bought straight off the wall of an Irish pub. However, even they were a little startled when the Dodo turned up, stored with a mass of crocodile bones. 'They do have common characteristics, crocodiles and birds', Jack Ashby, the museum's learning access manager, said. 'It was an understandable mistake.' The dodo remains emerged as the Grant, part of University College London, moved its 70000-item collection to a new home in an Edwardian former medical library. The Dodo is an exceptional find. No complete specimen survives, although in the nineteenth century at least two were destroyed by curators who decided they were in unacceptably poor condition, including the one at the Natural History Museum in Oxford (Fig. 1) that inspired Lewis Carroll's dodo in Alice in Wonderland. The bones will be displayed alongside another treasure of the collection, the Grant's Quag-ga-an extinct South African relative of the horse, resembling a zebra. The old catalogue said the collection held two zebras: it turned out that one was a donkey, and the other was the Quagga, one of only seven almost complete skeletons in the world. 'People are fiercely protective of this museum,' manager Natasha McEnroe said. 'They loved the old fashioned cases jammed full of specimens, and they didn't want a thing changed. But this new space is so beautiful, we hope people will love it even more.'
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