Whatever the reason, light-colored dodos stuck around. A single painting by Roelandt Savery had an even stronger effect. His rendition of the dodo, created around , differed from earlier drawings of dodos as long-legged and spry in showing the dodo as a fat, stumpy bird. There are only two confirmed accounts of live dodos that were displayed in Europe, and Savery probably never saw a still-breathing dodo. Most artists who illustrated the bird had not seen a living specimen.
This situation left at least one tell-tale sign in artistic renderings of the bird — the enlarged nostrils. Sketches of live and recently-deceased birds show the nostrils as being very small, but in skeletons and stuffed specimens the soft tissue was gone, leaving the nasal cavity open and looking relatively large.
If a dodo restoration has large gaping nostrils, then it was based upon a long-dead specimen. Mistakes about dodo anatomy gained a cultural inertia that was difficult to stop. Extensively reviewed by dodo-expert Julian Hume in , illustrations of dodos were based on scrappy remnants and the works of others. Strangely, though, the dodo became an almost mythical creature as soon as it became extinct.
To some 18th century naturalists, the dodo was about as real as a griffin, and there seemed to be no conclusive evidence that the bird had ever actually existed. Given that the French took control of Mauritius in and found no sign of the dodos, it seemed possible that the birds were the product of exaggeration and overactive imaginations.
It was only in the early 19th century, when European naturalists began describing dodo scraps scattered among various museums, that it became widely recognized as a real animal that had recently gone extinct at the hands of our species. Scientists working today know more about the dodo than the naturalists who overlapped in time with the last birds, although much about this strange bird remains uncertain. Among the frustratingly fuzzy questions about the dodo was how much it weighed.
Here the notes of eyewitnesses and estimates made by scientists conflict. The higher estimate is consistent with the pudgy, waddling creature seen in seventeenth century paintings, whereas the lower bar fit the earlier reports of svelt, long-legged dodos.
According to a paper just published by Delphine Angst, Eric Buffetaut, Anick Abourachid that used leg bones — from femur to ankle — to estimate the mass of the bird, dodos may have come in at just under the previous lower limit. Dodos only weighed about 22 pounds. This is about as heavy as a wild turkey, and the scientists proposed that the heavier estimates of the 17th century mariners may have been inspired by the puffed-up appearance of some birds and a bit of exaggeration.
In order to truly understand the dodo, though, we need more remains of the bird. Despite the number of preserved dodos brought back to Europe, scientists have rarely had the opportunity to study whole skeletons. The scant sampling of dodo remains collected during the 17th century were lost, destroyed, and crumbled to dust. As with many cherished stories, though, this is untrue. The first scientific assessment of a complete dodo skeleton was made in by Richard Owen.
For much of its history, Mauritius would have been a tough and turbulent place for wild animals to live. It was volcanically active and regularly struck by cyclones, which could cause severe food shortages. Extreme climatic shifts led to long periods of severe drought, fueling wildfires and mass animal die-offs. As thirsty animals crowded around the shrinking water surface, they left nutrient-rich droppings that fed the growth of toxic bacteria.
Many thousands of animals, from at least 22 different species, perished as the lake transformed into a muddy, poisonous swamp. Some critters likely also simply got mired in the muck.
Though many dodos died at Mare aux Songes—indeed, the swamp is a major source of preserved dodo bones—the species soldiered on. Dinosaurs, another icon of extinction and obsolescence, had a reign of some million years. Excavations of Fort Frederik Hendrik, which housed Dutch settlers between and , suggests that the settlers fed mainly on livestock they brought to the island, as well as local fish.
Where did dodo birds live? The dodo was endemic to the island of Mauritius, miles from the Eastern coast of Madagascar. The dodo was primarily a forest bird, occasionally venturing closer to the shoreline. More than 26 million years ago, these pigeon-like birds found paradise while exploring the Indian Ocean: the Mascarene Islands. With abundant food and no predators, the birds had no reason to leave.
And so, over the years their descendants slowly grew bigger and heavier, their beaks grew larger, their wings smaller: dodos evolved. When did the dodo go extinct? Until recently, the last confirmed dodo sighting on its home island of Mauritius was made in , but a estimate by David Roberts and Andrew Solow placed the extinction of the bird around Why did the dodo became extinct?
The dodo had no natural enemies on Mauritius. Life was sweet for dodos until humans also discovered the Mascarenes, in the late s. Despite the fact that humans were far bigger then them, dodos were not afraid of these intruders. When sailors arrived in the sixteenth century they found that the dodo was very easy to catch, and even though it didn't taste very nice, many were eaten. The dodo's natural habitat was almost completely destroyed after people started settling on Mauritius.
And when pigs, cats and monkeys were introduced, they added to the problem by eating the dodo and its eggs.
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