The dodo vanished 175 years before Lewis Carroll introduced his favorite bird to his favorite little girl in Alice in Wonderland.
Alice has fallen, along with a mouse, sundry birds, and several other "curious creatures" into a pool of her own tears. The Dodo proposes that all should dry themselves by holding a foot race, in which the contestants begin running whenever they wish and run until the Dodo decides the race should end. Everyone wins, everyone receives a prize, and everyone gets quite dry.In John Tenniel's famous illustration, the bird is solemn and wise, a rather distinguished-looking gentleman, not at all the "dumb-dodo" of common parlance. After all, the Dodo of the story was meant to represent Carroll himself, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, and who sometimes stammered his name "Do-Do-Dodgson."
The biologist Bradley Livezy of the University of Kansas has wondered (Nature, Sept. 23, 1993) if the dodo's curious physique was a result of so-called paedomorphosis, in which development stops when a creature becomes sexually mature, although some parts of the body have not yet achieved developmental maturity. Thus we get, as one observer noted, a bird that resembles "a young duck or gosling enlarged to the dimensions of a swan." With his sweet/sad fixation on little girls, Lewis Carroll seems to have had his own problems achieving sexual maturity, which makes his choice of ornithological persona even more appropriate.
