The 95% complete composite skeleton of extinct bird constructed by an enthusiast who bought bones from private collections

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The first near-complete skeleton of a dodo bird to come up for sale in nearly 100 years has fetched £346,300 at auction.

The 95% complete skeleton was painstakingly constructed by a man who started buying bones from private collections and auctions in the 1970s.

The collector decided to part with the item, and it fetched a hammer price of £280,000 – or £346,300 with buyers’ premium, which covers the auctioneer expenses – at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, West Sussex, on Tuesday.

Errol Fuller, natural history curator at Summers Place Auctions, said the piece was an “amazingly rare” example of “one of the great icons of extinction”.

An auction house spokeswoman said the buyer was a private collector who successfully bid over the phone.

She said: “The dodo bones had been collected by a dodo enthusiast for 40 years until he realised he had enough bones to create an almost complete skeleton of this extinct bird.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The near-complete dodo skeleton was the first to come up for auction in nearly 100 years. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

“There are only about 12 similarly complete skeletons in existence and they are all in museums around the world.”

Dodos, which were popularised by their role in the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, grew to 3ft (1m) tall and were flightless, with pigeons as their closest relatives.

First seen by Dutch sailors in 1598, they lived on the island of Mauritius and became extinct around 70 years after their discovery.

The Mauritian government has since banned exports of dodo bones, and auctioneers believe it highly unlikely that another composite skeleton will come up for sale again.

Summers Place has a track record of selling unique skeletons. In November 2013, it sold a long-necked Diplodocus longus dinosaur skeleton to the Natural History Museum of Denmark for £400,000.