Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is John Bachelor speaking with the author Stephen Moss, his new book Ten Birds

that Change the World, the Dodo Bird, immediately you think the Dodo Bird,

Extinction Mauritius Islands off the coast of Africa.

Stephen met a dodo when he was six, seven years old in London,

or did he?

Stephen Moss telling the story of the Dora Bird and the concept of extinction. It has a peculiar twist to it. Once

upon a time, Extinction, the Dodo Bird, Stephen Moss.

The concept of extinction doesn't really exist at this point because at that point society

in the West is extremely religious, extremely Christian and the idea that the Creator

might create species and then allow them to go extinct was simply incomprehensible to people and it actually took another

fifty to a hundred years for during the Enlightenment for people to argue that some creatures

had indeed gone extinct. So it's great irony that the

do-do-no-one who knew the do-do- alive would ever have understood the idea of

extinction and yet it is become the most famous extinct

creature of all time.

The late 1960s I would have been seven or eight years old, my mother, she was a single parent

and she was the only child and she would take a week

off work every summer and we would go up to London and the only place I remember going was the

Natural History Museum in Kensington which is still a wonderful place to go and there

was a big selection of stuffed birds there and I was fascinated by birds so I would stand

by them for hours and one of them was a stuffed do-do-do-do-do and I remember standing

in front of it, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-and-a- probably about three feet tall, you know, this was a large and slightly terrifying

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