One of nature's most intriguing species, the dodo, now has a new respectable image - thanks to Oxford University scientists.

The extinct, flightless bird, immortalised by Lewis Carroll, has long been a figure of fun, portrayed as fat, ungainly and stupid.

But now scientists at Oxford University Museum of Natural History have created a new image for the bird, which appears far less clumsy and more in proportion than previously thought.

Using a combination of contemporary paintings, a real head and foot preserved in the museum and bones dug up in its Mauritius home, the Edinburgh-based ornithologist Andrew Kitcher created a new reconstruction. The museum then commissioned a life-size model, which is now displayed next to the reconstructed skeleton. The result, which is about the size of a large turkey, is far less comic than the famous 1651 painting by Jan Savery, which is also on show at the museum.

Dr Matthew Wills, assistant curator of zoology, said the new model had been created by studies of the bone structure. He said: "You can clearly understand that an animal of the traditional image would have fallen over. It would have been totally inept. Instead, it would have been a lot slimmer."

Asked about why the bird continued fascinate people, he added: "At lot of species that become extinct will not have been noticed but it's relatively unusual for something large to become extinct. It's one of the very first examples of something that's been lost through the experience of man." He added that one theory was that the dodo had become extinct because predators like dogs had been introduced.

The museum has the only existing piece of skin taken from the dodo's head and plans to use a sample for DNA analysis.

This could reveal how the dodo evolved from its distant relative, the pigeon.

The dodo remains have been housed in the Oxford Museum since it opened in 1860. They are said to have inspired the dodo's appearance in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a frequent visitor. Dodo facts *The dodo was a flightless relative of doves and pigeons

*It lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean

*Charles Dodgson - known as Lewis Carroll - was a frequent visitor to the University Museum with a group of children and a favourite exhibit was the dodo

*Dodgson was said to identify with the bird because he had a stammer and pronounced his own name Do-do-Dodgson

*Dutch sailors who arrived on the island in 1598 found them tough and inedible

*They called the dodo the valghvogel or 'disgusting bird'

*The dodo is thought to have died out because of the rats, cats, pigs, monkeys and dogs which sailors and colonists introduced to the island *By the 1670s dodos had been wiped out - the first time in recorded history that humans had wiped out an entire species

*Captive dodos were brought back from Mauritius to the city's of Europe and became a subject for artists

Story date: Friday 29 January

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