Sir – While Michael Johnson’s tale of a pet dodo is an engaging story, there’s no chance of it being true (Feature, August 19).

Firstly, Oxfam are much too canny these days to let such a precious item go for 95p in their bargain bin. Then if the ‘discoverers’ truly had a genuine diary, they would surely have taken it to historians and zoologists to get second opinions, rather than self-publishing, always a suspect move!

Finally, an endorsement from fiction-meister Philip Pullman is a bit of a giveaway — one would expect David Attenborough or Richard Dawkins on the genuine article.

There were dodos in Oxford in the 17th century, but all had been dead and stuffed for decades by the 1680s. Two were in the Anatomy School, one in Ashmole’s Museum — the latter’s head and foot surviving in the University Zoology Museum.

Also, dodos could be kept as pets: one was exhibited as a curiosity in London in 1638, having also survived the long sea journey from Mauritius.

However the last undoubted living dodo was seen in 1662, killed by shipwrecked sailors on an offshore islet — the mainland ones apparently vanished in the 1640s due to pigs raiding their nests — so a living bird in 1683 is, shall we say, a little improbable.

The name lived on a bit — Dutch settlers transferred it to a smaller flightless bird, the Red Hen, which did survive into the 1680s or 1690s.

I’m sure the book will do well — after all in dodo-land, as the good Mr Carroll reported, everyone wins and gets prizes. Hang on, did I just see a rabbit in a frock coat hurriedly disappearing down a tunnel I might just squeeze through . . . grab notebook, follow bunny . . .

Anthony Cheke, Co-author of Lost Land of the Dodo — An ecological history of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues (2008), Oxford