Birds
Dodo
Raphus cucullatus · also called dodo
The dodo is the most famous extinct animal in the world, and one of the least understood. It was not a stupid, waddling turkey; it was a metre-tall flightless pigeon, well adapted to its island until the moment that island stopped being safe. It had lived on Mauritius for thousands of years, and it was gone within about a century of the first ship dropping anchor.
Overview
The dodo lived only on Mauritius, in lowland forest. It stood about 1 m tall, weighed perhaps 10–18 kg on recent estimates, and was grey-brown with tiny useless wings, stout yellow legs, a tuft of curly tail feathers, and a large head with a big hooked bill.
A giant pigeon
Despite its size, the dodo was a member of the pigeon and dove family. Its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon; its nearest relative overall was the Rodrigues solitaire, another large flightless island bird, also extinct.
No fear, no defence
Mauritius had no native land predators, so the dodo had no instinct to flee, nested on the ground, and laid a single egg — all fatal weaknesses once people and their animals arrived.
The collapse
First recorded in 1598, the dodo was gone by about 1662. Hunting was not the main cause; the meat was reportedly poor. The real damage came from the pigs, monkeys, rats, cats, and deer that ate the eggs and chicks and competed for food, plus forest clearance.
What survives
There is no intact stuffed dodo anywhere. The best surviving soft tissue is a dried head and foot at Oxford; most museum dodos are models. A de-extinction project using the Nicobar pigeon has been announced.
Dodo: common questions
Was the dodo really as fat and clumsy as it is drawn?
Probably not as much as the famous images suggest. Many well-known dodo pictures were painted in Europe from captive birds that had been shipped long distances and overfed, or were copied and exaggerated from earlier art, and they show a bloated, waddling creature. Analysis of the bones tells a different story, of a bird that was heavy but reasonably athletic, able to move at speed through rocky forest, with strong legs and a body shape adapted to a ground-living life. It was still flightless and slow to escape a determined predator, but it was not the helpless blob of the cartoons.
Why did the dodo go extinct so fast?
Because it had none of the defences a species needs to survive sudden change. Living on an island with no predators, it had lost any fear response and any behaviour for protecting a nest, it bred slowly with a single egg on the open ground, and it could not fly away from trouble. When Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century they brought, deliberately or accidentally, pigs, monkeys, rats, cats, and deer, all of which raided dodo nests and ate the eggs and chicks or stripped the forest of the fruit the adults needed. Add direct hunting and the clearing of lowland forest, and a bird that had thrived for thousands of years was wiped out within a human lifetime.
Could the dodo be brought back?
A company working on de-extinction has announced a project to do so, using the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo's closest living relative, as a genetic starting point and a surrogate to lay the eggs. The plan is to identify the genetic differences that made a dodo a dodo, using DNA recovered from museum specimens, and to edit those changes into pigeon cells. Even if a dodo-like bird could be produced, there are hard questions about where it would live, since Mauritius is now full of the very predators that killed the original, and whether a bird raised by pigeons would behave like a dodo at all.
Is the story that a tree depends on the dodo true?
That idea comes from a 1970s hypothesis about the tambalacoque, a Mauritian tree whose seeds were said to need to pass through a dodo's gizzard before they could sprout, so that the tree had almost stopped reproducing after the dodo vanished. The claim was widely repeated but has since been largely discredited. Tambalacoque seeds do germinate without any animal, the surviving trees are not all the same great age, and other now-extinct or reduced Mauritian animals such as giant tortoises and parrots also ate the fruit. The tree's decline had more to do with logging and introduced pigs and monkeys than with the loss of one bird.