THE dodo may be dead - so dead, in fact, as to have become the stuff of proverb - but at least the unfortunate flightless bird is not forgotten.

And for that, we may have the son of a North Yorkshire clergyman to thank.

Harry Pasley Higginson was a true Victorian. Born on May 25, 1838 and brought up in Thormanby, North Yorkshire, where his father was a vicar, he trained in that most Victorian of professions, civil engineering.

His first job was in Latvia, helping to construct the Riga to Dunaberg railway. Then, in 1862, he pitched up on the remote Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, to help build its first railways.

The young engineer, like many Victorians, had a healthy curiosity - and, also like many Victorians, appears to have kept a regular journal.

It's this habit that we have to thank for what we know of his part in the discovery of the first dodo bones.

When Higginson arrived in Mauritius, the young engineer was well aware he was coming to the home of the semi-mythical bird. Unfortunately, at the time, that's all the dodo was.

The first sightings of the famous flightless bird - a member of the pigeon family - were apparently by Portuguese sailors in 1505. The squat, ungainly creature seems to have remained perfectly at home on its isolated island until Mauritius was "re-discovered" by Dutch traders led by Admiral Jacob Cornelis van Neck in 1598. However, Neck apparently kept a journal - now lost - in which he recorded details of the unusual bird - which were used by fellow Dutchman Clusius in 1605 as the basis for a picture and description in his First Natural History Of The World.

The dodo had entered the scientific literature - but already its days were numbered.

By the 1660s, the helpless bird - unused to defending itself against any kind of predator - had been driven to extinction by a combination of humans hunting and eating it and the introduction to the island of rats, deer, goats and, in particular, monkeys and pigs, which are notoriously fond of eggs.

After its extinction, knowledge of the dodo was based chiefly on drawings from the 16th and 17th centuries by artists who may never even have seen it.

The most famous image was a 1626 painting by Roelandt Savery - and the first dodo book was written by Strickland and Melville in 1848. The only known dodo remains were a head and a foot, kept in Oxford from at least 1656, and a few scattered remnants in some European museums.

What made the dodo more fascinating, says Mary Kershaw, director of collections at York Museums Trust, was that no one had encountered any other remains since its extinction. The Victorians questioned the existence of the bird, liking it to the griffin and phoenix.

By the time Higginson arrived in Mauritius in 1862, therefore, the dodo had taken on a mysterious, almost mythical status. Not that the engineer was about to let that put him off searching for evidence.

Alastair McOran-Campbell, who has been researching his great-grandfather Harry Higginson's life, has obtained a copy of the Victorian engineer's travelogue - entitled Reminiscences of Life And Travel 1859-1872 - which brings his great-grandfather vividly to life, and reveals the part he played in the re-discovery of the dodo.

Towards the end of his time in Mauritius, Higginson was strolling along the nearly-completed railway's embankment one morning.

"I noticed some coolies removing some peat soil from a small morass," he writes. "They were separating and placing into heaps a number of bones and various sorts among the debris. I stopped and examined them as they appeared to belong to birds and reptiles and we had always been on the lookout for bones of the then-mythical Dodo. So I filled my pocket with the most promising ones for further examination."

He took the bones to George Clarke, a Mauritius schoolmaster. Clarke happened to have a book about the dodo - probably the one by Strickland and Melville. "The result showed that many of the bones undoubtedly belonged to the Dodo," Higginson records.

"This was so important a discovery that Clarke obtained leave to go out to the morass and personally superintend the search for more. He eventually despatched a large quantity to the British Museum, which sold for several hundred pounds."

Richard Owen, the foremost comparative anatomist of the day, formally described the British Museum bones to science. The material was transferred to the Natural History Museum, where the bones can still be seen today.

You don't have to travel to London to see dodo bones, however. Higginson, obviously not forgetting his Yorkshire roots, despatched a box full of bones to museums in York, Leeds and Liverpool.

The York bones, now in the keeping of the Yorkshire Museum, form the centrepiece of a new exhibition opening at the museum on April 3.

Dust Off The Dodo - Fabulous Finds That Time Forgot will showcase some of the York Museums Trust's rarely-seen gems and will tell the fascinating stories behind an array of unusual artefacts, many of which have not been on public display for several years.

The story of Higginson's discovery of the dodo bones will be part of a group of exhibits exploring the theme of extinction. It is a story which is, finally, about to receive due recognition.

According to Mary Kershaw, Julian Pender Hume of the Natural History Museum, a palaeontologist and dodo expert, plans to write a paper with Higginson's great-grandson Alastair McGoran-Campbell, who lives near Reading, exploring the roles of Higginson and Clarke in the discoveries of the dodo remains.

The story of the dodo continues to fascinate to this day. Recent studies and DNA tests in Oxford have led to the discovery of new evidence about the bird, says Mary, suggesting it was faster-moving and sleeker in size than the 16th century artists' images suggest - and that it was closely related to the still-living Nicobar pigeon of South East Asia.

But for many the image of the dodo as a slow-moving, slightly overweight character remains, immortalised by the character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.

This book was co-incidentally published in 1865, the same year Higginson found the bones in Mauritius. The author's real name was Charles Dodgson and he regularly took a little girl called Alice to see the dodo remains at Oxford.

He was inspired by the dodo head and foot he had seen in the museum, and Dodgson immortalised both Alice and the bird in his book.

And what of Higginson himself?

He left Mauritius in 1866, says Mary, moved to India, then to New Zealand where he became chief railway engineer and settled for the rest of his life.

A stained glass window has been built in the Cathedral at Wellington in New Zealand, in recognition of his work as a civil engineer.

In one of its panels, unmistakable in its squat ungainliness, stands - a dodo.

Dust Off The Dodo, Fabulous Finds That Time Forgot, opens at the Yorkshire Museum on April 3

Updated: 10:32 Monday, February 23, 2004