Despite surviving into the 1600s, very little was recorded about the dodo in life. ©Julian Hume
Since last being sighted in 1662, the dodo has become the symbol of extinction.
But despite its fame, astonishingly little is known about this large, flightless bird. Scientists are attempting to change this, revealing in the process that dodos were actually active, fast birds that thrived on the island of Mauritius before being driven to extinction by people.
The dodo is one of the most famous birds in the world, but we know agonisingly little about how it lived and behaved.
This is largely down to the fact that it was first recorded and then driven to extinction all before the modern science of describing species was established. Our early knowledge of the bird is based on ad hoc reports from sailors and traders rather than on a type specimen – the first-collected individual from which a species is defined.
As a result, over the last 400 years there’s been a lot of confusion over the dodo and a closely related species of bird known as the solitaire. Both birds lived on remote islands in the Indian Ocean, and both were subject to debate over exactly how they came to be – they were even considered mythical at one point.
The Mare aux Songes site shows that Mauritius was a hugely diverse island supporting a range of bird and reptile life before people settled. ©Julian Hume
When Dutch sailors first explored the Indian Ocean, they encountered two birds unlike any seen elsewhere – the dodo and the solitaire.
Both these species were large, flightless, forest-dwelling birds. They were only found on two isolated islands in the southern Indian Ocean, with the dodo living on Mauritius and the lesser-known solitaire found on the island of Rodrigues.
The discovery in 1865 of an ancient marsh called Mare aux Songes on Mauritius has allowed scientists to reconstruct the environment in which the dodo lived. This site has provided an unprecedented insight into what the island was like before people arrived.
The marshes were once lakes surrounded by wetlands and forests with tall, dense canopies dominated by Tambalacoque, also known as dodo trees (Sideroxylon grandiflorum), palms and screw pines (Pandanus species). The lakes acted like oases in otherwise dry areas of the island.
This vital water resource attracted dodos, along with a range of other native wildlife including giant tortoises, fruit bats, giant skinks, pigeons, parrots, owls, rails and many species of songbird.
Today, we know that both the dodo and the solitaire evolved from pigeon-like ancestors. But for hundreds of years the lack of specimens, unusual descriptions and reliance on observations from settlers and sailors meant that the two birds became something of a myth.
Victorian ornithologist Hugh Edwin Strictland noted in 1848 that “so rapid and so complete was their extinction that the vague descriptions given of them [the dodo and the solitaire] by early navigators were long regarded as fabulous or exaggerated, and these birds, almost contemporaries of our great-grandfathers, became associated in the minds of many persons with the Griffin and the Phoenix of mythological antiquity.”
Even contemporary drawings and descriptions were largely inaccurate, such as this 1634 sketch by Sir Thomas Herbert. ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
A number of different species of dodo were described from early accounts, with little understanding of how they may have looked or evolved. Over the past four centuries, this confusion surrounding the dodo has meant that their place on the evolutionary tree has frequently been discussed.
Early reports suggested that the dodo was a rail, a vulture or even an ostrich, and it wouldn’t be until the 1800s that it was eventually realised that it was a giant, flightless pigeon. More recent genetic studies have further revealed that the closest living ancestor of the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon, which is native to Southeast Asia.
It’s thought that a flighted relative of both the dodo and the solitaire landed on Mauritius and Rodrigues sometime after the volcanic islands formed roughly 10 million years ago. Over time, and with a lack of land predators, these birds spent more and more time on the ground, growing bigger and eventually losing the ability to fly altogether.
When Dutch sailors landed on Mauritius in 1598, the dodo had evolved to be supremely adapted to its island lifestyle. But within less than a hundred years the dodo would be extinct, with the last reliable sighting of it occurring in 1662 or possibly as late as 1680.
The majority of dodo skeletons in collections are composites made up of bones from multiple different individual birds. ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Dutch sailors weren’t the first people to land on Mauritius and Rodrigues. These islands had previously been visited by Arabian and Portuguese ships, but the Dutch were the first to settle.
The Dutch sailors started to hunt the dodos and solitaires, which, due to their isolation, were unafraid of them. This massively reduced these birds’ numbers, but it was the menagerie of creatures that the sailors brought with them – including dogs, cats, pigs and rats – that sealed the birds’ fate. These introduced animals not only killed the birds, but likely ate their eggs too.
Within just a hundred years, the dodo, the solitaire and many of the other species that gathered in the island swamps were extinct.
Despite its subsequent fame and prominence in popular culture, the rapid nature in which the dodo went extinct means it’s been remarkably difficult to reconstruct what it looked like.
The birds were unusual enough that some were sent abroad, with at least 11 individuals thought to have reached Europe alive and a few others recorded arriving in India and potentially as far as Japan. But despite this, there are no surviving taxidermied specimens – all the examples in museums today are reconstructions.
Historic reconstructions of the dodo (left) show them as plump, squat birds, while more modern reconstructions (right) show them as more slender and upright. ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Though we don’t have any dodo soft tissue, we do have lots of their bones. The huge subfossil bonebeds at Mare aux Songes on Mauritius have provided thousands of individual dodo bones, mixed in with the remains of the island’s other species of animals and plants.
Even with this abundance, only two almost complete dodo skeletons have been found where all the bones belong to the same individual. Despite being discovered much earlier, they remained unstudied until the twenty-first century. These extremely rare and valuable skeletons are both held in the Mauritius Natural History Museum located in the island’s capital Port Louis.
A third, less complete, skeleton is housed in the Durban Natural Science Museum, South Africa. All other dodo skeletons are composites of different bones from multiple different individuals unearthed at the Mare aux Songes.
This means that the appearance of the dodo, including its plumage and colouration, has been extremely difficult to figure out.
Descriptions and drawings of the dodo from the 1600s inaccurately depict them as fat, slow, flightless birds lumbering around the island – almost willing their own extinction. Recent scientific evidence has now challenged this.
It’s now known that they were much leaner than has been depicted with a more athletic, upright pose. They also may have had much darker feathers, likely ranging in colour from a light grey to a darker brown.
They likely stood about 70 centimetres tall and probably weighed around 12 kilogrammes. Their weight, however, is now thought to have varied with the seasons and the timing of their breeding behaviour. This could have influenced the early reports about the birds being plump and slow.
By studying the bones of dodos, we now know more about them than ever before including when they likely bred. ©Julian Hume
The fossil record is now revealing more about the dodo’s life history than we’ve ever known. The dodo lived close to the coast and on offshore islets, as well as in the lowlands and mountains, occupying both dry and wet forest zones.
Unlike most illustrations that show a fat, ungainly bird, the dodo was actually relatively slender and quite agile, despite being among the heaviest birds known today.
It had a large gizzard stone to help with digestion, which suggests it ate a diet of fallen fruits and seeds. CT scans of its braincase have revealed it had a similar intelligence level to modern pigeons. These also show that they had large and well-differentiated olfactory bulbs rather than larger optic lobes, suggesting that they relied on smell rather than sight to detect food.
There’s also evidence they had seasonal fat cycles based on winter and summer in the southern hemisphere. They were leaner during the non-breeding, hot, rainy season from October to March and fatter during the cool, dry breeding season from April to September.
Each female nested and produced a single egg. Dodos fiercely defended their territories, and males probably fought each other with their large beaks.
The Nicobar pigeon is the closest living relative to the dodo, meaning that it is being looked at by those wanting to de-extinct the dodo. ©Vladimir Wrangel/Shutterstock
The original species is, as the saying goes, as dead as a dodo. Nothing short of a time machine would allow the species to exist today.
But bioengineering company Colossal is proposing to make a living replica of the species. They are attempting to use sequenced DNA from subfossil dodo bones to build a full genome. Using this as a guide, the team then hope to genetically modify the genome of the bird’s closest living relative – the Nicobar pigeon – to make it more similar to that of the dodo.
This will then be used to hatch a dodo-like pigeon. It’s important to note that with so little actually known about the appearance and behaviour of the extinct bird, it’s difficult to judge how accurate this will be. So keep your eyes peeled – a dodo could be coming your way soon.
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