Adam Savage is best known for hosting the Discovery Channel program Mythbusters, but he’s got a lot more going on than televised science experiments. He’s a master builder and special effects guy for major movies, and he brings his craft to students (Savage teaches advanced model-making at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco). Oh, and he’s obsessed with the dodo, which has been extinct for over 300 years.

Savage, like any good obsessive geek, does his homework. In a talk (see below), he explains his miscellaneous geeky obsessions, including Storm Trooper costumes, hand-drawn maps of Middle Earth, decoder rings, and so on. He also reveals the “CREATIVE PROJECTS” folder on his Mac, which contains huge quantities of ephemera related to his, uh, creative obsessions. So…one day, Savage decided he wanted a dodo skeleton, but replicas were cost-prohibitive. Being a geek with a background in building stuff, he decided to make one.

Watch Savage present his fast-paced story of obsession, geekery, building, and natural history in the video below. What starts as an attempt to replicate a dodo bird skeleton ends up on another famous, hard-to-find bird, the Maltese Falcon. Trust me, it’s supremely entertaining. (Note: there’s a touch of coarse language, but not much.)

(Via Waxy.org.)