The Mysterious Extinct Dodo Bird

The Dodo Might be the Most Famous Extinct Bird, but We Don’t Actually Know Very Much About It.

© Rosemary Drisdelle

Aug 18, 2006

The Dodo bird is extinct. We all know that. Most of us envision the Dodo as a large round awkward bird with a big plume of tail feathers and an enormous beak - which is mostly correct, except for the awkward part - but do we know anything else about it? What family it belonged to? Where it lived? What it ate? What caused the extinction of the Dodo bird? If you've ever wondered about these things, read on for some interesting

Dodo bird history:

• The Dodo bird was a member of the Columbidae, or pigeons. We know this because some soft tissue of a Dodo was available for DNA testing. The closest relative to the Dodo still alive today is the Nicobar pigeon.
• Dodo birds lived only on the island of Mauritius, an island about the size of Rhode Island in the Indian Ocean. It is thought that their ancestors, originally from Southeast Asia, flew there some time during the last 8 million years and then evolved into a flightless, isolated species.
• An adult Dodo was about a meter long (3 ft) and weighed as much as 20 kg (44 lb). It was grey and had small wings. Though flightless, it was probably quite agile.
• Dodos ate seeds and fruits, readily available on the forest floor in Mauritius. With a generous food supply on the ground and no predators, Dodos didn't need to fly.
• At one time it was thought that Calvaria trees were dependent on the Dodo for reproduction: the Dodos ate the seeds and cracked the seed coat, passing viable seeds in their feces. The theory has been discounted however, and Calvaria trees are still with us.
• Dodo birds were not good to eat. Although they were large and easy to kill, the Dutch settlers on the island called them "walckvogel," or "disgusting bird." Apparently Dodo meat is very tough.
• The extinction of the Dodo bird was complete by the end of the 17th century. No one knows exactly why it died out, but hunting, habitat loss, and competition with introduced animals such as pigs and monkeys probably combined to doom the species.
• Despite the fact that Dodo birds lived in historical times, no complete skeletal remains and very few preserved parts of the extinct Dodo bird were collected, a oversight that has made it very difficult to study the bird in its absence. A recent find of many Dodo bird fossils in Mauritius (see my blog for this story), complete with other preserved pieces of the ecosystem, will answer many questions.

Sources for this article:

Extinct Dodo Related to Pigeons, DNA Shows. Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News, February 28, 2002.

Raphus cucullatus

Newfound Island Graveyard May Yield Clues to Dodo Life of Long Ago. Carl Zimmer, New York Times, July 4, 2006.

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