Dodo Profile
Until about 330 years ago, Pottering about in the wooded undergrowth in Mauritius, you might have found an enormous pigeon.
This one-meter bird gave up on flight when it reached the island, having no predators around to evade. And in doing so, sealed its fate, after perhaps 10 million years on the island, when humans finally discovered it.
The Dodo is the most iconic of all extinct birds, and to this day inspires dreams of conservation in its honour.
Dodo Facts Overview
| Habitat: | Woody and dry coastal undergrowth |
| Location: | Mauritius |
| Lifespan: | Unknown |
| Size: | 1 metre (3’ 3”) tall |
| Weight: | Possibly up to 17.5 kg (39 lb) |
| Colour: | Likely a yellow-brown to black down |
| Diet: | Raw fruit, mostly palm |
| Predators: | Humans |
| Top Speed: | Unknown |
| No. of Species: | Probably 1 |
| Conservation Status: | Extinct |
It took an embarrassingly short amount of time for human presence to dispatch the dodo. Having been previously spotted by Arab and Portuguese sailors, it was the Dutch who finally finished them off, but their loss was not entirely in vain.
Their loss may have been the first alert to the fact that something was wrong, and despite our continued destruction of the environment, without this awareness, things could perhaps have been a lot worse by now.
Interesting Dodo Facts
1. Strange Penguin
The island was visited by other sea-faring nations before the Dutch came and claimed it. The Portuguese were one of these, and they named it Swan Island, possibly after the dodo itself.
But the name they gave to the dodo was slightly different. When Admiral Neck claimed the island for The Netherlands, his Vice-Admiral led expeditions to explore it. He described large birds, with wings the size of a pigeon’s, which the Portuguese had named “penguins”. 1
2. They probably tasted good
Apparently, it’s commonly passed around that Dodo meat was inedible, but an account from the very Admiral who led the voyage leading to their discovery begs to differ. In Neck’s journal, the first culinary mention of the bird is found:
“in this place great quantity of foules twice as bigge as swans, which they call called Walghstocks or Wallowbirdes being very good meat….”
“…But finding an abundance of pigeons & popinnayes [parrots], they disdained any more to eat those great foules calling them (as before) Wallowbirds, that is to say loathsome or fulsome* birdes”.
Other accounts suggested the breast and stomach were particularly tasty, and confirmed that they were caught and eaten by the Dutch on the daily.
Regardless of whether or not the meat was delicious, the malnutrition that was rife in old-timey maritime culture would have trumped flavour as a slow-moving and large proteinous lump would have been hard to ignore.
And this certainly left its mark on the species.
3. 91 Years
This is how long it took from the first recorded mention of the bird to its total annihilation as a species.
As the sailors discovered and populated the island, Mauritius was treated to an onslaught of invasive species, not least of which were the humans themselves.
The settlers set to work eating the plentiful birds, who, after millions of years with no predators, had not only lost their flight, but also their flight response, and had no evolutionary reason to expect any danger.
But it likely wasn’t humans that finished them off. As we are seeing now in island nations such as New Zealand, the animals we bring with us are as much a culprit in the extinction of native fauna, commonly by way of rats eating eggs or cats eating young’uns.
In this instance, it’s said that the pet monkeys the sailors brought with them and the pigs introduced by settlers devastated their eggs, their nesting environment, and really everything the birds ever knew, and by 1690, the last remaining bird was likely dead.
4. But this did teach us something
After roughly 100,000 years of travelling around the globe whacking animals with sticks and poking holes in them with spears until they went extinct, it may have been the demise of the dodo that triggered the first moment of human introspection in relation to our impact on the ecosystem.
The dodo, with its weird looks and mythical nature, became the first high-profile case of extinction in the animal kingdom and perhaps triggered our earliest research into the damaging effects on our environment that doing whatever you want all the time can have.
We still haven’t quite come to terms with this, but there is hope that, with advancements in genetic science, we may see one again. The first step is finding their next of kin.
5. They have some surprising relatives
The dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, yet its closest known relative followed a similar fate. The Rodrigues solitaire was a very bizarre bird in its own right, living a similarly flightless island life on a nearby rock.
This one lasted a little longer, and held out until 1790, showing that the lessons learned from the Dodo perhaps take a while to sink in.
Both the Dodo and the Solitaire’s closes living relative, The Nicobar pigeon, on the other hand, remains alive and well on account of it still being able to fly, and therefore not confined to a single island or forced to lay its eggs on the ground.
The lessons around how to not extinct everything do seem to be taking their time to trickle into the heads of many, even 300 years later, but there are some working at the problem from the other angle. 2 3
6. Some think we’ll bring it back
In January 2023, Colossal Biosciences completed their trio of high-profile targets for de-extinction with the Dodo, referring to it as the “poster child… for how human habitat alteration can drive species to extinction”.
Using genes from the Nicobar pigeon, and the sequence of DNA available in the soft tissue samples of the dodo, the company aims to reprogram Nicobar DNA to produce new dodos.
As the science stands, this is likely still more or less a pipe dream, but that’s not to say it will always be.
Critics say these announcements are more about marketing than conservation, but with more attention on the topic, we can be hopeful that progress will be made, and that perhaps someday, ecosystems can be renewed using the very members that maintained them for so long. 4
Dodo Fact-File Summary
Scientific Classification
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Columbiformes |
| Family: | Columbidae |
| Genus: | Raphus |
| Species: | cucullatus |
Fact Sources & References
- JULIAN P. HUME (2006), “The history of the Dodo Raphus cucullatus and the penguin of Mauritius”, Historical Biology.
- (1995), “SCIENTIFIC CORRESPONDENCE ”, Nature.
- “Index of Bird Species”, earthlife.
- Will Sullivan (2023), “This Company Wants to Bring the Dodo Back From Extinction”, Smithsonian Mag.