A dodo comes back from the dead in Canton Jura

The dodo recreated by Christian Schneiter over 300 years after it became extinct Keystone Archive

A Swiss taxidermist is hoping to open a museum for one of the biggest private collections of stuffed animals and birds in Europe. Once complete, it would be home for - among other creatures - an example of the long-extinct dodo.

But first Christian Schneiter needs financial backing for his project, which he estimates will cost some SFr10 million ($6.6 million). The local authorities at Courrendlin in canton Jura have provided him with land, and now he is seeking sponsorship from private benefactors and business concerns.

At present, a limited number of the 2,000 stuffed animals and birds – all of them either rare or extinct – are kept in Schneiter’s workshop in the village of Vicques. The workshop is currently open to the public for an exhibition of stuffed monkeys, but the taxidermist is running out of space.

One of the highlights of Schneiter’s collection is a dodo, a flightless bird, which used to inhabit the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. The dodo became extinct less than 100 years after the species was discovered by Dutch and Portuguese sailors landing on the island during the 16th century.

The bird, which weighed an average of 20 kilogrammes, provided enough food for some 40 sailors, and not being able to fly was rapidly hunted to extinction. Although artistic representations have given it a mythical status, few museums have intact body parts of the bird.

Schneiter managed to track down a dodo’s head and foot, preserved in alcohol in a British museum. By working on them, and after consulting documentation on the dodo in Amsterdam – where the first dodos were brought to Europe in the 17th century – he was painstakingly able to recreate a life-size model.

The current exhibition at Vicques ends on June 6.

by Richard Dawson