Due to a fold in the space-time continuum I have found a live dodo in my living room. It appears to be an adult male in decent health.
Since possession is nine tenths of the law, I’m considering this formerly extinct specimen my property. However, I have no interesting in keeping it since it keeps crapping all over the place. So, I intend to sell it off. I’ve had it verified as the genuine article.
Naturally I want to get the most bang for my dodo buck. How much do I reckon I’d get if I put it up for auction at Christies, or invited private bids? I know that technically it’s priceless, but that isn’t an amount I can put in the bank and I want some actual money for this thing.
But anyone who might be interested in paying for this bird would inevitably want to know about your right to sell it, how it was acquired, etc. You may find it challenging to get them to accept your tale of a fold in the space-time continuum.
And given that the mere possession of such an animal is illegal (in the US, and probably many other places), you may find yourself in hot water - IOW, that your Dodo has a significant negative value.
The federales can have my dodo when they pry it from my cold, dead hands! What statute would they invoke to gun me down? Seeing as it went extinct before the worrying trend that is the United States even existed I’d be interested to see how they could prosecute me.
The original Dutch name for it was walgvoghel, ‘loathsome bird’, so one suspects it wouldn’t be a decent replacement for a nice roast chicken.
I would think it’d have more value to a collector type than for research. It’s not as though a single dodo has a lot to tell us – we already know what they looked like, ate, weighed, etc and the lack of additional dodos for it to interact or breed with really cripples the science.
probably around the price of a picasso; a couple hundred million, I’d guess. Researchers wouldn’t have much need for it; we’ve got plenty of DNA and preserved specimens and reports. Although if we can clone it in a chicken or something, it might be worth more. But if the govn’t really wants it, they’re not gonna pay you for it, they’re gonna call it endangered and just gonna take it.
Now, whatever you used to bend space-time is another story.
Even though it is a single dodo, it would be a lot more valuable if it were a female dodo who just finished having sex before appearing in your living room.
Do you have the results of the pregnancy test which I would need before submitting a bid.
Almost started a new thread on this, as to where you could get away with such ownership (of a bird, of a artifact, of alien technology, of unique natural things such as a natural source of antimatter or monopoles). Obviously the best place to negotiate for ownership of a alien spacecraft would be from Mars, but what would be your best shot on earth for such a thing?
Not really. There are no complete dodo skins (just one dried head). (The ones you see in museums are reconstructions.) There is only one set of sketches known to have been drawn from living birds. We don’t know which of the other depictions were done from captive specimens (which may have been overfed and excessively fat) or from stuffed specimens (which may have been prepared poorly). The illustrations vary, so we don’t really have good information on coloration. One early account said they fed on fruit, but that’s the sum total of information on its diet in the wild. We don’t know their preferred habitat, or hardly anything about their behavior.
Even a single live bird would give us far more reliable information on the species than we have today.
