Unlike the red rail and other extinct Mascarene birds, the Rodrigues rail was not illustrated by contemporaneous artists. Olson described reconstructions made for the British zoologist Walter Rothschild's 1907 book "Extinct Birds" and the Japanese ornithologist Masauji Hachisuka's 1953 book "The Dodo and Kindred Birds" as "rather fanciful". The English artist Frederick William Frohawk based his restoration in the former book on an outline illustration, which was in turn based on a sketch drawn by Herbert, which is now known to depict the red rail. The German zoologist Hermann Schlegel thought it depicted a species of dodo (which he called "Didus herbertii") from Rodrigues when he drew the outline in 1854, and that it was the species mentioned by Leguat.