Rowland Ward model of a Dodo, made of chicken feathers, duck wings and—for the tail—curled ostrich feathers. In , when a Dutch ship arrived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, its sailors found a paradise clothed in a dense forest of ebony and bamboo and filled with bewildering wildlife.
Many of the animals there were found nowhere else in the world, including a large flightless bird that would eventually be called the Dodo. One hundred years after its discovery the Dodo had vanished making it the first documented case of extinction caused solely by human interference.
Because Mauritius is a volcanic island and was never attached to the mainland, it had no mammals other than bats that had flown there. Seventeenth-century observers commented on its diet of seeds, fruit, and probably tree roots.
The first official name given to the unique bird was Cygnus cucullatus by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg in Cucullatus means "hooded," and was used in reference to the drawing of the Dodo by the Dutch botanist Carolus Clusius. In the Dodo was renamed as Struthio cucullatus in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae by Linneaus; Struthio is Latin for "ostrich. In , the Dodo was renamed once again to Didus ineptus in the 12th edition of Systema Naturae. Did you know?
The history of the name gives clues to possible close relatives of the Dodo. Although the Portuguese had discovered Mauritius in , they did not publish any materials as they considered their trade routes to be state secrets. However, the Dutch published descriptions of their voyages that were widely translated and generated great interest. They used a 3-D laser scanner to produce high-resolution images of each bone, later reassembling these images into a three-dimensional, digital model of the skeleton.
The team also scanned and modeled a second skeleton discovered by Thirioux, which is composed of the bones of at least two different dodos.
Their findings were published in a special issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in March. The dodo, they observed, was a sturdy, robust bird, with thick leg bones and a broad pelvis. Numerous previous studies have suggested that dodos were not nearly as fat as they looked in historical illustrations, and the new digital reconstruction reveals a bird with a more upright posture and slimmer ribcage than commonly depicted.
Indeed, it was probably quite agile. One possibility is that the birds used their wings for balance, especially when moving quickly. The scientists also created similar brain models for eight closely related species, including several types of modern pigeons and the Rodrigues solitaire, another extinct flightless bird that lived on an island near Mauritius. The dodo and the solitaire, the researchers reported in February , both had enlarged olfactory bulbs, which is unusual for birds.
What is a dodo bird? The dodo was a flightless relative of pigeons and doves, which once inhabited the islands of Mauritius and Reunion. What did the dodo look like? Dodos were large birds, approximately three-feet tall, with downy grey feathers and a white plume for a tail. The Dodo had tiny wings and its sternum — an area with strong wing muscles for flying birds — was correspondingly small.
The massive birds could reach a body weight of more than 20 kilograms! Dodos had a distinctive beak that may have been pale yellow or green which was heavy, curved and probably the dodo's only real defense; it was capable of delivering a fairly painful bite. Where did dodo birds live? The dodo was endemic to the island of Mauritius, miles from the Eastern coast of Madagascar.
The dodo was primarily a forest bird, occasionally venturing closer to the shoreline. More than 26 million years ago, these pigeon-like birds found paradise while exploring the Indian Ocean: the Mascarene Islands. With abundant food and no predators, the birds had no reason to leave. Their beaks adapted to the food they were able to find easily, and they gradually became flightless.
Many island species become flightless and reach larger sizes because they adapt to isolated habitats with few large predators and reduced competition.
Unfortunately these particular adaptions left the dodos ill-prepared for the European sailors and the domestic animals they brought with them when they first arrived on Mauritius.
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