Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ustad Mansur was a seventeenth-century Indian painter and naturalist who served as a court artist under Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir, dying in 1624. He earned the title ustad, meaning master, during Akbar's reign, and Nãdir-al-'Asr, meaning Unequalled of the age, from Jahangir. His birth year is not known.
Mansur was the earliest artist to depict the dodo in colour and the first to illustrate the Siberian crane. His Siberian crane painting predates Peter Simon Pallas's formal scientific description of the species in 1773. Both works remain primary visual sources for zoologists.
Mansur painted a turkey cock received from Goa in 1612, a Barbary falcon sent by Shah Abbas of Persia in 1619, a brown dipper observed in Kashmir in 1620, and a zebra in 1621. A dodo painting is also attributed to him or a close contemporary. Jahangir personally directed many of these commissions.
The unsigned dodo painting attributed to Mansur or a close contemporary was discovered at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The dodo is thought to have been brought to Jahangir's court through Surat, via Portuguese-controlled Goa. Peter Mundy, an English traveller, described two dodos at Surat between 1628 and 1633.
Abanindranath Tagore was taken to see Mansur's Siberian crane painting by E.B. Havell, principal of the art school at Calcutta. After examining the painting through a lens, Tagore was inspired to abandon oil on canvas and take up gouache on paper.
Works by or attributed to Mansur are held at the Indian Museum in Kolkata, the National Museum in Delhi, the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum in Jaipur, and the Chhatrapati Sivaji Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai. A dodo painting attributed to him or a close contemporary is at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. A crater on the planet Mercury also bears his name.