1/15/2024 0 Comments Dodo bird actual pictureThey got more than they asked for, as they rediscovered a dodo mass grave that had been partially excavated in 1865, but had slowly faded back into obscurity afterwards. In 2005, a Dutch team of archeologists set out to take cores for pollen samples in a swampy area, Mare aux Songes, in the southeastern part of Mauritius. It is time for a reappraisal of the dodo. Photograph: Claessens Lab / Mauritius Museums Council Eventually, all that remained was the image of a gluttonous, clumsy bird, destined for extinction.Ī 3D digital model of the only complete skeleton of a single dodo, found in 1903 on Mauritius. As a flightless, ground-nesting bird, the dodo never stood a chance. Dodo chicks and eggs were eaten, nests destroyed, and vegetation disturbed. The ubiquitous ship-rats, the pigs, goats and Rusa deer brought along as food, and the macaques brought along as pets from Southeast Asia these were the species that, once set loose in the island’s pristine ecosystem, wreaked havoc on its members who had since long lost their defenses against predators. In order to really understand the extinction of the dodo, we need to look beyond the humans, to the suite of non-native species that followed closely behind in their footsteps and set into motion an ecological disaster that resulted in the dodo’s swan song. In fact, analyses of 17 th century settlement refuse assemblages show a focus on introduced mammals and a lack of dodo remains, indicating that dodos did not form a significant part of the settlers’ diet. However, there is no evidence to support the idea that dodos were eaten to extinction. Less than a century after the first humans set foot on the island, the dodo had left the stage.ĭespite the popular belief that dodo meat was inedible because of its revolting taste, dodos were eaten by these early settlers, and even considered to be a delicacy by some. As is often the case, catastrophe ensued. After millions of years of idyllic island life, humans, in the form of Dutch sailors eager to stretch their legs after months on sea, arrived on Mauritius in 1598. The dodo’s ancestor may have island-hopped from Southeast Asia all the way down to the isolated Mascarene Islands, but the details of its journey remain fuzzy at best. DNA evidence indicates that the dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, a glossy-feathered ground-dwelling pigeon from Southeast Asia. It is an understandable sentiment, but a wrong one.ĭespite its iconic status, we have very few clues about where the dodo came from, and how and when it arrived on the remote island of Mauritius, located about 500 km east of Madagascar. And now that they are extinct, you come back for their bones as well!” A thing you might hear when you are a Dutch palaeontologist excavating dodo bones on Mauritius. “An up-to-date and comprehensive review of everything we know about the dodo and solitaire.“You Dutch people killed the dodo. This extraordinary book pieces together the story of these two lost species from the fragments that have been left behind. So quickly did the bird disappear that there is insufficient evidence to form an entirely accurate picture of its appearance and ecology, and the absence has led to much speculation. The first recorded descriptions of the dodo were provided by Dutch sailors who encountered them in 1598-and within a century, the dodo was extinct. It contains all the known contemporary accounts and illustrations of the dodo and solitaire, covering their history after extinction and discussing their ecology, classification, phylogenetic placement, and evolution.īoth birds were large and flightless and lived on inhabited islands some five hundred miles east of Madagascar. The Dodo and the Solitaire is the most comprehensive book to date about these two famously extinct birds. This account of two extinct bird species offers “an amazing amount of history, references, facts, maps, and illustrations” ( Library Journal).
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