Colligo 3 (3) - Hors-série n°2

PALÉONTOLOGIEPaul Carié, Mauritian naturalist and forgotten collector of dodo
bonesPaul Carié, naturaliste mauricien et collecteur oublié d'os de dodo
DELPHINE ANGST(1) & ÉRIC BUFFETAUT(2)(1)

School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Life Sciences Building, 25 Tyndall Avenue, Bristol, BS8 1TQ,
United Kingdom - angst.delphine@gmail.com(2)

CNRS, UMR 8538, Laboratoire de Géologie de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, 24 rue
Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France. Palaeontological Research and Education Centre, Maha Sarakham
University, Maha Sarakham, Thailand - eric.buffetaut@sfr.fr
Citation : Angst D. & Buffetaut É., 2020. Paul Carié, Mauritian naturalist and forgotten collector of dodo bones. Colligo, 3(3). https://perma.cc/8WH4-VLSP

KEY-WORDSPaul Carié
Mauritius
Dodo
Collections
Leguatia

MOTS-CLÉSPaul Carié
Ile Maurice
Dodo
Collections
Leguatia

Summary: Paul Carié (1876-1930) was a Mauritian industrialist and naturalistof French descent, who was affiliated with various French scientific societies
and carried out research on many aspects of the zoology of the Mascarene
islands. However, his work on the extinct fauna of Mauritius is now largely
forgotten, probably because he published very little on that topic. Nevertheless,Paul Carié collected numerous specimens of extinct vertebrates, including dodo bones, from the famous Mare aux Songes locality, which once belonged tohim. In addition, he bought dodo specimens from sites in the mountains ofnorth-eastern Mauritius from Louis Thirioux, another early twentieth-century
collector. A forgotten collection of subfossil bones brought together by Paul
Carié was rediscovered in France in 2015. Dodo bones presented by Paul Cariéand his descendants are now part of the collections of several museums in
France and Switzerland and have been the subject of several recent studies.
Résumé : Paul Carié (1876-1930) était un industriel et naturaliste mauricien
d'ascendance française, qui fut affilié à diverses sociétés scientifiques françaises et qui effectua des recherches sur de nombreux aspects de la zoologie
des Mascareignes. Cependant, ses travaux sur la faune éteinte de l'île Maurice
sont aujourd'hui largement oubliés, probablement parce qu'il publia très peu
sur ce sujet. Néanmoins, Paul Carié récolta de nombreux spécimens de vertébrés disparus, y compris des os de dodos, à la Mare aux Songes, site qui à une
certaine époque lui appartint. En outre, il acheta des spécimens de dodo provenant de sites dans les montagnes du nord-est de l'île à Louis Thirioux, un autre
collectionneur du début du vingtième siècle. Une collection oubliée d'ossements subfossiles récoltés par Paul Carié a été redécouverte en France en 2015.
Des os de dodos donnés par Paul Carié et ses descendants appartiennent maintenant aux collections de divers musées en France et en Suisse et on fait l'objet
de plusieurs études récentes.

Introduction
Although the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) survived for about a century after the discovery of
its native island of Mauritius by European navigators, much of what we know about it isbased on studies of subfossil bones discovered
in swamps and caves from the 1860s onward.
Early reports on living dodos by 17th century

visitors to Mauritius are often vague and sometimes contradictory – no naturalist ever studied the dodo ''in the wild'' and descriptions ofliving birds brought to Europe are very brief
and not very informative. With a few exceptions, even contemporaneous pictures andpaintings of the dodo have turned out to be oflimited reliability because of artistic licenceand exaggeration (Ziswiler, 1996; Hume, 2006).

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PALÉONTOLOGIE
Moreover, little was preserved of the few dodos that were brought alive to Europe, the caseof the Oxford dodo being a well known
example (Pickering, 2010). The work done by ahandful of naturalists who collected dodo remains on Mauritius in the late 19th and early
20th centuries is thus of primary importancefor our knowledge of many aspects of the anatomy of the dodo. The best known of them certainly is George Clark, who collected a large
number of dodo bones from the famous Mareaux Songes locality in the 1860s, a material
which formed the basis of several studies onthat extinct bird. Other well known dodo collectors were Théodore Sauzier and LouisThirioux, whose contributions to dodo
research are often mentioned (Fuller, 2002;
Grihault, 2005; Hume, 2006; Parish, 2013). By
comparison, although it does sometimes getmention (Grihault, 2005; Cheke & Hume, 2008;
Parish, 2013), the work of Paul Carié (18761930) has been relatively neglected. Yet, as theco-owner of the Mare aux Songes in the early
20th century, he brought together a very large
collection of subfossil bones (including those of
dodos) from that locality, which are now partof European collections. In addition, throughhis connection with Thirioux, he also acquired
dodo remains from a completely different taphonomic setting (viz. caves and screes), which
also found their way to European museums.
The aim of the present paper is to show how
Carié's work was significant for our knowledgeof the dodo and therefore deserves to be better
acknowledged.

A short biography of Paul Carié
François Joseph Paul Carié (Fig. 1) was born on
Mauritius on 6 November, 1876 (see biography
by Halais, 1941a). He belonged to an old French-Mauritian family that had been established on
the island since the 18th century. After inheriting a considerable fortune (including bothland on Mauritius and property in Paris) fromhis uncle Thomy Thierry, he was initially successful as a plantation owner and industrialist.
The sugarcane processing plant he ran on his“Mon Désert” estate was at the time one of themost modern on Mauritius. Besides his activities as a naturalist, Paul Carié spent much timeand energy lobbying for the retrocession of
Mauritius to France. After its discovery by Portuguese navigators in the late 16th century, theisland became a Dutch possession, until it wasabandoned in 1710. It was then acquired by

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Fig. 1. A photographic portait of Paul Carié, wearing a French army
uniform, circa 1914 (courtesy of the heirs of Paul Carié).

France in 1715. It was conquered by the British
during the Napoleonic wars, and officiallytransferred to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in
1814. Carié’s activities in favour of a retrocession to France began before the First World
War. He was mobilised in 1914 and served astranslator in London and Paris. In the aftermath of the war, Carié hoped that the negotiations which led to the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles (in 1919) could include a retrocession of
Mauritius to France, possibly through an exchange of territories with Britain (Carié, 1919),
but this did not happen: Mauritius remained a
British colony until its independence in
1968. During the war, Carié’s sugar-making
business declined and he sold it off and settled
in Paris in 1918. There, he continued his scientific activities until his death on 19 December
1930.

Paul Carié’s scientific activities
Paul Carié’s was involved in many aspects of
the natural history of the Mascarene islands,
and more generally the Indian Ocean (Crépin,1931). He was especially interested in entomology and ornithology, as well as in the introduction of foreign species on the islands of the In-

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PALÉONTOLOGIE
dian Ocean. He was a member of the French
Zoological Society, of which he was president in
1923. He became a correspondent of the
Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in 1914,
and then an associate researcher in 1918. He
was also general secretary of the Société desAmis du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle et du Jardin des Plantes (Mangin, 1931). In 1910, andagain in 1921, he was sent by the Muséum National and the French Ministry of Public Instruction on research trips to the islands of the
Indian Ocean. He thus collected thousands ofspecimens, including living birds and turtles forthe zoological garden of the Jardin des Plantes.
Altogether, he discovered 125 new species on
the Mascarene islands (Crépin, 1931). However,Paul Carié published relatively little on his discoveries (a partial list of his publications wasprovided by Cheke and Hume, 2008), and hiscollections were mainly studied by other scientists, sometimes a long time after his death.

the description of a large bird - the so-called“Géant” - observed on Mauritius in the
18th century by the French traveller Leguat.
Although the reality of Leguatia gigantea, described as a giant rail, had been accepted by various authorities on extinct birds, including
Rothschild (1907), who published a fanciful reconstruction of it (Fig. 2), and Oudemans(1917), Carié (1930) conclusively showed that
Leguat’s report in all likelihood was based on amisidentification of flamingos, which are occasionally seen on Mauritius, and that the socalled Leguatia had never existed (Buffetaut,2014). Interestingly, despite Carié’s convincing
demonstration, some recent authors (e.g. Balouet & Alibert, 1989) still list the Géant among
the extinct birds of Mauritius.

Paul Carié and the extinct
vertebrates of Mauritius
When he inherited the Mon Désert sugar estate,
Paul Carié also became co-owner of the Mareaux Songes, the main subfossil vertebrate locality on Mauritius (Rijsdijk et al., 2009). The
swamp deposits there had been made famousin the 1860s by the work of George Clark, the“modest schoolteacher of Mahébourg”, as Carié
described him (Carié, 1930: 212), who provided
the scientific community with the first comprehensive collections of dodo bones. Clark’s work
had been continued two decades later by Théodore Sauzier, who also collected abundant remains of dodos and the accompanying fauna.
Paul Carié conducted excavations there from1904 to 1907, and again from 1910 to 1913
(Carié, 1930). A large amount of skeletal material was thus collected, most of it being donatedby Carié to the Paris Natural History Museum.
The squamate remains in that collection were
described by Robert Hoffstetter in a series ofnotes published in the 1940s (Hoffstetter, 1945,
1946a,b). Hoffstetter named an extinct speciesof blind snake from Mare aux Songes Typhlops
cariei, in honour of Carié (Hoffstetter, 1946b).
Carié himself published very little about theextinct vertebrates of Mauritius. His main contribution on the topic is a critical investigationof Leguatia gigantea, a supposed extinct bird
species from Mauritius that had been erectedbytheGermannaturalist
Schlegel(Schlegel,1858). Schlegel had based his work on

Fig. 2. An artist’s impression of Leguatia gigantea Schlegel, the imaginary “giant rail” ofMauritius. Carié (1930) showed that Leguat’s report of the “Géant” was in all likelihood based onsightings of flamingos. Chromolithograph by F.W. Frohawk, from Rothschild (1907).

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PALÉONTOLOGIEZOOLOGIE
Carié’s conclusion about the non-existenceof Leguatia gigantea was based both on a thorough examination of the reports by Leguat
and other early travellers, and on the results of
excavations on Mauritius, which had yielded“countless remains” of birds, turtles, lizards
and bats, but not a single bone of the “Géant”.
Carié alluded to excavations at Mare aux
Songes, both his own and those of his predecessors, and also to the researches carried out inother parts of the island, notably those of LouisThirioux (1846-1917). Thirioux was born inFrance, but emigrated to Mauritius at an early
age and became a hairdresser in Port-Louis. In
his spare time, he collected living molluscs andsubfossil vertebrates in the mountains of thenorthern part of Mauritius (Montagne duPouce, Montagne du Corps de Garde). AlthoughThirioux’s contribution to dodo research is occasionally mentioned (Fuller, 2002; Grihault,
2005), few details are usually provided about
his activities, beyond the fact that the specimens he collected ended up in the hands ofcollectors and naturalists who sent them on toEurope (Halais, 1941b). However, the recent

Fig. 3. Map of Mauritius (from Carié,1919) showing the location of Mareaux Songes (red dot) and of
Thirioux’s localities (blue circle) in
the mountains near Port-Louis.

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description of the exceptional dodo skeletonsdiscovered by Thirioux and kept in Port-Louisand Durban has revived interest in this rather
forgotten collector (Claessens & Hume, 2015).
Carié himself, in his article on Leguatia (1930)
noted that Thirioux searched the caves andscrees on the mountain slopes, “with an admirable patience and perseverance”, and foundcompleteskeletons
of
the
dodo
and Aphanapteryx, as well as remains of otherbirds, turtles and lizards. It also appears that
Carié was one of the naturalists who acquired
Thirioux’s finds. In an introductory note to amemoir by Louis Germain on terrestrial andfreshwater molluscs from the Mascarene
islands, Carié (1921) noted that part of the material described in that work had been collected by Thirioux during his explorations of
the mountains of northern Mauritius, in thecourse of which he also found subfossil bones(Fig. 3). In addition, he mentioned that on several occasions he had purchased collections
from Thirioux. This explains some aspects ofthe dodo specimens donated by Carié to European museums.

Colligo 3 (3) - Hors-série n°2

PALÉONTOLOGIEPaul Carié’s dodo specimens
Several museums in Europe hold collections of
dodo bones donated by Paul Carié. Not unexpectedly considering Carié’s close association
with this institution, the National Museum of
Natural History in Paris is one of them. Janoo(1996) described a Raphus cucullatus skull fromthe Paris collection, the label of which bears“Vallée aux Prêtres” as geographical origin, as
well as Carié’s name. Other specimens in Paris
apparently were collected by Thirioux. The“light rosewood tint” of the skull is very different from the usual brown colour of Mare aux
Songes specimens (Janoo, 1996). The Vallée auxPrêtres is in the mountains just east of PortLouis, in northeastern Mauritius. The specimen
was in all likelihood collected there by Thirioux
and then purchased by Carié. There may be
more dodo material donated by Carié in the
Paris Museum.
A second French museum in which dodo bones
donated by Carié are kept is the museum(''Fabrique des Savoirs'') at Elbeuf-sur-Seine(Seine-Maritime, Normandy), which holds alarge natural history collection, largely brought
together in the late 19th and early 20th century
in relation with the activities of a local natural
history society. Paul Carié donated a set of dodobones, together with mollusc specimens, to theElbeuf museum in 1923 (Coulon, 1923; Coulon &Saint-Amand, 1922,1923). A description of thedodo material was published by Angst and Buffetaut (2010). The Elbeuf material includes both
specimens showing the typical brownish colourof Mare aux Songes bones and others which aremuch lighter, almost white (Fig. 4). The latterbones are in all likelihood from Thirioux’s localities in the mountains of north-eastern Mauritius (see below).
Paul Carié also donated dodo bones to the Musée Cantonal de Géologie in Lausanne, Switzerland (Anonymous, 2007). According to thearchives of the museum, the specimens weresent to Maurice Lugeon, who was then professor of geology at the University of Lausanne, in1907. They comprise about 30 bones, some dark

Fig. 4. Two femora of Raphus cucullatus donated by Paul Carié to the Elbeuf Museum in 1923. Above, 8.0.67, a brown-coloured specimen from
Mare aux Songes. Below, 9.0.67, a whitish specimen in all likelihood collected by Thirioux.

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PALÉONTOLOGIEZOOLOGIE
brown, others whitish in colour, which havebeen mounted to produce an incomplete composite skeleton. A handwritten note by Carié(kindly communicated by R. Marchant) provides not only a list of the bones sent to Lausanne, but also important information about
their provenance. In it, Carié mentions that thewhite bones come from Mr Thirioux’s excavations in the screes and caves in the vicinity ofPort-Louis, while the brown ones come from
Mare aux Songes (which at that time belonged
to Carié). On the basis of this note, it seems extremely likely that the bones donated by Carié
to the Elbeuf museum also have this dual origin.
It cannot be excluded that dodo material donated by Paul Carié may exist in other European collections. A composite mounted skeleton, illustrated in Carié (1976), was still preserved by descendants of Paul Carié until recently (J. Carié, personal communication).
However, records show that the dodo bones
held by the museums of Lyon and La Rochelle
were not provided by Paul Carié, but purchased from Natural History dealers.

Discovery of a new collection
brought together by Paul Carié
As shown before, the natural history work
done by Paul Carié was very important andpermitted to increase significantly the numberof specimens known from Mauritius. In 2015,
this story took a new turn, when the descendants of Paul Carié contacted one of us (D.A.)

Fig. 5. Dodo bones belonging to
the collection rediscovered in2015 and donated by Paul Carié's
heirs to the Elbeuf Museum.

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because they were clearing the old family
house close to Paris and had found some old
specimens which they thought might be ofscientific interest. A rapid investigation of thiscollection quickly showed that it contained
various very interesting specimens. This newcollection includes an important number ofmodern molluscs, insects and eggs. Unfortunately, the exact origin and history of these specimens are unclear and in the absence of documents will be difficult to elucidate . The second
part of this collection includes a large numberof vertebrate bones. These can be divided into
two groups: modern vertebrates including
mainly rodents and birds, the origin of which is
unknown, and a very large number of subfossil
specimens, including mainly bones of giant
turtles (Cylindraspsis), bats and dodos (Fig. 5).
The origin of these bones is clearer, the brownones are from the Mare aux Songes, and thewhite dodo bones may be from various caves
as already explained by Carié himself (seeabove). Finally, several drawings and written
documents are also associated with these specimens. All these specimens have been donatedto the Elbeuf Museum, where previous specimens from Paul Carié were already kept. The
complete collection is kept together and has
been inventoried with collection numbers.
Some of the dodo bones were used for the recently published first histological study of dodobones (Angst et al., 2017; Angst, 2018) and otherbones are currently studied by an internationalteam, which shows the importance of this newcollection and of the work done by Paul Carié.

Colligo 3 (3) - Hors-série n°2

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Conclusion

mandie. Bulletin de la Société d’Étude desSciences Naturelles d’Elbeuf, 2010: 9-16.

Although Paul Carié published very little on the
dodo or other subfossil vertebrates from Mauritius (apart from his debunking of Leguatia),
his contribution to our knowledge of the Mauritian extinct fauna was far from negligible.
Like other local naturalists, including George
Clark, Théodore Sauzier and Louis Thirioux, hegathered large collections of bones which were
mostly sent to European institutions and studied there. As noted above, Carié’s collection in
the Paris Natural History Museum was the basis for Hoffstetter’s descriptions of various hitherto unknown elements of the extinct herpetofauna of Mauritius. By the time Carié presented sets of dodo bones to museums in Paris,
Elbeuf and Lausanne, the osteology of Raphus
cucullatus was already well known, so that thismaterial was mostly used for display purposes
rather than as a basis for new descriptions.
Nevertheless, dodo specimens in Paris (Janoo,
1996) and Elbeuf (Angst & Buffetaut, 2010)
were described a long time after Carié (andThirioux) collected them, and some of this material has been used for recent studies on theweight of the dodo (Angst et al., 2011), and to
do the first bone histological study permitting
to distinguish for the first time the males andthe females and to observe the moulting eventsand propose a timing for these events during
the year (Angst et al., 2017; Angst, 2018).

ANGST D., BUFFETAUT E. & ABOURACHID A., 2011.
The end of the fat dodo? A new mass estimate
for Raphus cucullatus. Naturwissenschaften, 98:
233-236.

In addition to his published papers on the living fauna of the Mascarenes, Paul Carié’s
achievements as a collector of remains of theextinct vertebrates of Mauritius definitely deserve to be remembered.

Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Joël Carié for documents
relating to his grandfather, to Delphine Glachant and the other descendants of Paul Carié
for their donation to the Elbeuf Museum, toJérôme Tabouelle for access to the dodo material in the Elbeuf Museum, and to Robin Marchant for valuable information about the dodobones sent by Carié to the Musée Cantonal deGéologie in Lausanne.

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