Given my obsession with dodos, I couldn't live so near Oxford and not go and visit the Oxford dodo.
It was important to me that I do it, but it wasn't one of the more enjoyable of my 50 Things.
The Natural History Museum in Oxford - much like the one in London - is a wonderful building, all marble pillars and vaulted glass ceiling, displaying rocks, gems, dinosaur exhibits, ...
both real and model skeletons ...
- and dead, stuffed animals in glass cases. It's a throwback to an age when collecting dead animals was acceptable. It's obviously a moral dilemma for the museums - the collections of stuffed animals already exist and studying the species in them could be of benefit to animals living now - but all the same these collections seem deeply anachronistic and viewing them made me both uncomfortable and sad. As indeed it should.
The Oxford dodo and its fellow exhibits are a reminder - like the Lonely Dodo video I posted last year - that we should never let this sort of thing happen again.
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