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Ammon News - The name of the flightless dodo bird may today be synonymous with ineptitude (its scientific appellation is, after all, didus ineptus), but the 19th-century scramble to find the first fossil remains of the extinct creature was anything but clumsy. The dodo was long considered a myth, the product of inaccurate descriptions by mariners and fanciful zoological thinking, but an 1848 monograph on the species, which was unique to Mauritius, challenged this view, sparking a race to find supporting evidence.

Leading the way was George Clark, a natural historian and schoolteacher on the Indian Ocean island, who in 1865 discovered numerous dodo bones in a marsh that abutted a railway embankment. Clark sent 100 bones in exchange for £100 (roughly $15,000 today) to the British Museum’s Richard Owen, who burnished his already sterling scientific reputation by besting fellow academics and publishing first.

Clark, however, kept many of his earliest dodo finds for himself. Some of these bones will be sold on September 24 at Summers Place Auctions, in southeast England.