“Its meat tasted like chicken” went one of the famous legends about the Dodo. “It looked like an ostrich, only with a larger beak” went another.
How true are these claims, and what facts have paleontologists been able to piece together about this unfortunate bird whose existence lies only in the past?
Dear Dodo
The Dodo inhabited the island of Mauritius, which is more than 1,000 kilometres east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It is believed that the ancestors of the dodo were Nicobar pigeons which had previously landed on the island, and that Dodos were probably first seen by Dutch settlers who landed on Mauritius in 1598.
Dodos lived in ground nests and their food consisted of tasty fruits that had fallen from trees, nuts and roots. This abundance of food and the absence of predators, many believe caused them to flourish and contributed to their gradually becoming the flightless, three foot tall, 22 kg birds that have become the stuff of legends.
The Story of Its Extinction
In 1505, the Portuguese became the first humans to set foot on Mauritius. The island quickly became a stopover for ships engaged in the spice trade with India and the rest of Asia. The dodo thus became a welcome source of fresh meat for the sailors who killed them in large numbers for food.
These birds were very easy to kill because they were so trusting – having had no need to develop natural defense mechanisms – that they would actually waddle up to armed Dutch settlers, who would then proceed to hit them with clubs, being unaware that these creatures wanted to kill them for food!
These trusting birds served as food not only to humans, but also to the animals that the settlers brought with them and introduced to the island. These were usually pet cats, dogs, macaque monkeys and other farm animals like pigs, as well as rats that had escaped from ships; these became the dodo’s new predators and would wreak havoc to the Dodo population on the island, attacking both mature dodos and their eggs.
Also, because the Dodo had no natural enemies, females enjoyed the unique luxury of laying only one egg at a time (other birds lay multiple eggs, in order to increase the odds of at least one egg escaping enemies or natural disaster and actually hatching). This one-egg-per-Dodo policy of the bird may have also quickened its extinction as they were raided mercilessly by Man and beast alike.
So, What Remains of the Humble Dodo?
Despite being one of the most famous extinct animals of all time, right up there with the wooly mammoth, no one actually knows for a certainty what the dodo looked like. Even the authorities tasked with the mandate of documenting and storing animal remains only have a composite of various specimens, not a complete one!
A BBC Earth article says that complete skeletons for the animal are incredibly rare, with one of the last ones destroyed in a fire in 1755. Hence, all the world has left of the humble dodo are a dried head, and a single foot at the Oxford Museum of Natural History; fragments of skull and leg bones at the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum in Denmark and the National Museum of Prague in the Czech Republic.
Though the Dutch and Portuguese settlers of Mauritius tried to ship a few living specimens back to Europe, most of these unfortunate Dodos didn’t survive the months-long journey.
Do We Really Know Anything About the Dodo?
Researchers at Oxford University state that the Dodo was extinct by 1680, a fact that is echoed in many other sources; however, scientists plotting the last known sightings of the bird on a graph suggest that the actual date is 10 years later than this estimate with some texts putting the date for an accepted confirmed sighting of a live Dodo at 1662.
In keeping with this theme of no one being exactly sure about anything to do with the Dodo, even the word Dodo itself is hotly contested. The main candidates are either, the Dutch word dodoor which when translated means sluggard, perhaps a reference to its inability to fly unlike most other birds; or the Portuguese word, duodo which translates to fool, perhaps due to its trusting nature in what it felt were safe environments.
Whatever future reconstructions of the Dodo come up, we will forever be intrigued by this humble, trusting bird who is a reminder of what happens when humans treat as of no respect the teeming, interesting and rich diversity of our dear earth’s ecosystem.
See Also: Amazing Country Facts (Mauritius)