Along with the dodo bird, the Calvaria tree also went extinct. Within a century, the last dodo bird died and marked its extinction. There were limited species available for the dodo bird to mate with so even a hybrid of a dodo bird and something else was not possible. The isolation of an island didn’t help with protecting the future of the dodo bird. The monkeys, dogs, and other creatures that came on the ships would steal eggs from the dodo bird, making it nearly impossible for them to reproduce and grow as a species. In Portuguese, Dodo connotes stupidity and the dodo bird became a food source for not only the humans that arrived, but their animals too. Th unique and naive nature of the dodo bird is where its name comes from. However, it never really needed to fly! The other animals on the island were not predatory so the dodo bird never developed a way to defend itself and instead would be very friendly with the colonizers, rather than skeptical. Some Dutch sketches suggest that it was around three feet tall and very heavy, too heavy to fly. Because it went extinct so long ago, there are few records of what it actually looked like. The Europeans were exploring the island in hopes of turning it into an isolated prison. The dodo bird was discovered in 1591 in Mauritius by Portuguese sailors. Almost everyone knows what the bird is, but do you really know why it went extinct? See highlights from the collections in an online exhibition, in a collaboration between the Museum and Google Arts & Culture.What really happened to the mysterious Dodo bird? This notorious species has a story of its own that exemplifies both the dangers of colonization and human carelessness with nature. Museum research collections hold close to a million bird specimens, representing more than 95% of the world's known bird species. Knowing more about the ecological history of Mauritius may reveal new information about the evolutionary history of this fascinating species. The dodo had evolved in isolation for millions of years and was unable to adapt to this new change. Its downfall came when humans arrived on the island and brought a host of competing animals that quickly overran the region. The species then became perfectly adapted to the Mauritian ecosystem. The ancestral pigeon lost its ability to fly because it had no natural predators, there was plenty of food on the ground and flying is very energy-intensive. We are using DNA sequencing to pin down the dodo's relationship to other birds.Īt some point, an ancestral relative of the dodo would have had to fly to get to Mauritius - it then evolved once it got there. Why was the dodo only found in Mauritius? Given their inability to fly, it suggests their brain was well-suited to sniffing out food on the ground. They also had large olfactory bulbs, which process smells. It was the same with the dodo - they wanted it to be more spectacular than any bird that came before.Īnalysis of the dodo's anatomy shows that it was actually very well-adapted to living in Mauritius.ĬT scans of skulls in the Museum's collection show that dodos were relatively intelligent birds, with large brains. In the paintings of the time, artists tended to make newly discovered animals look like bits of meat on legs. Most of these illustrations appeared in popular books and articles. Each illustrator wanted to make it bigger, fatter and more grotesque than previous work, just to sell the story. Over the following decades the image changed. The first illustrations o f the dodo were by mariners visiting Mauritius - they showed a slim, athletic bird. For a long time it was assumed that dodos were fat and stupid.
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