Two bones from the foot of a dodo were offered in the latest edition of Sworders' Out of the Ordinary sale, the Antiques Trade Gazette reported on October 9. The huge flightless bird went extinct in the Dutch colony of Mauritius around 1690, making any of its remains a fixture of natural-history collecting.

The bones belong to a group discovered in 1885 during the investigation of a swamp site in Mauritius. Such finds are the principal source of dodo remains worldwide: the bird's fragile bones survived mainly in marsh deposits where carcasses settled into oxygen-poor mud. By the late nineteenth century, when this group was recovered, the dodo had already been extinct for nearly two hundred years and existed mostly as a literary curiosity — a symbol of extinction itself.

Sworders' Out of the Ordinary sale specializes in curiosities and conversation pieces, and the dodo bones fit the format squarely: part natural history, part memento mori. The visible report does not disclose a hammer price, but the bones' inclusion signals continuing appetite for extinct-species specimens at regional auction.

Dodo material remains scarce on the market, and individual bones surface only occasionally. Their presence in an Essex sale underscores how natural-history lots have become a staple of the curiosity auction, sitting comfortably alongside the antiques, art and decorative objects that dominate the rest of the calendar. The result continues a pattern in which natural-history and curiosity lots punch above their weight at regional salerooms: buyers prize the story as much as the object, and few stories carry the symbolic charge of a species that became the very emblem of extinction.