Dodo

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a flightless bird that lived only on the island of Mauritius, located east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It is now extinct. Its nearest relative was the Rodrigues solitaire, another flightless bird that also died out. These two birds belong to the subtribe Raphina, a group within the pigeon and dove family, Columbidae. The dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon. A white dodo was once believed to have existed on the nearby island of Réunion, but scientists now think this idea came from confusion with the extinct Réunion ibis and from paintings of white dodos.

Based on subfossil remains, the dodo stood about 62.6 to 75 centimeters tall and likely weighed between 10.6 and 17.5 kilograms in the wild. Its living appearance is known only from 17th-century drawings, paintings, and written accounts. Because these images vary greatly and only some were drawn from live birds, the dodo’s exact look remains uncertain, and little is known about its behavior. It has been shown with brownish-grey feathers, yellow feet, a tuft of tail feathers, a grey, featherless head, and a beak that was black, yellow, and green. It used gizzard stones to help digest its food, which probably included fruits. Its main habitat is thought to have been the forests in the drier coastal areas of Mauritius. One report says it laid only a single egg per clutch. Scientists believe the dodo lost the ability to fly because food was plentiful and there were few predators on Mauritius. Although it has often been pictured as fat and clumsy, it is now thought to have been well suited to its environment.

The first written record of the dodo came from Dutch sailors in 1598. Over the following years, sailors hunted the bird, invasive species preyed on it, and its habitat was destroyed. The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662. Its extinction was not noticed right away, and some people considered the bird a myth. In the 19th century, researchers studied a small number of remains from four specimens that had been brought to Europe in the early 1600s. Among these is a dried head, the only soft tissue of the dodo that still exists. Since then, many subfossil remains have been collected on Mauritius, mostly from the Mare aux Songes swamp. The dodo’s extinction less than a hundred years after its discovery drew attention to the then-unrecognized problem of humans causing the disappearance of entire species. The bird became widely known from its role in *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland* and has since become a common symbol of extinction and obsolescence in popular culture.

Early scientists classified the dodo in various ways, calling it a small ostrich, a rail, an albatross, or a vulture. In 1842, Danish zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhardt suggested, based on a dodo skull he found in the Natural History Museum of Denmark, that dodos were ground pigeons. This idea was mocked at first, but later supported by English naturalists Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Melville in their 1848 book *The Dodo and Its Kindred*, which aimed to separate fact from fiction. After dissecting the preserved head and foot of a specimen at the Oxford University Museum and comparing them with the few remains of the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, they concluded the two birds were closely related. Strickland noted that while not identical, they shared many features of the leg bones otherwise seen only in pigeons.

Strickland and Melville showed that the dodo was anatomically similar to pigeons in many ways. They pointed to the very short, horny part of the beak, which had a long, slender, featherless base. Other pigeons also have bare skin around their eyes that nearly reaches the beak, as in dodos. The forehead was high compared to the beak, and the nostril was low on the middle of the beak and surrounded by skin—a combination of features found only in pigeons. The dodo’s legs were more like those of ground pigeons than of other birds, both in their scales and skeleton. Drawings of the dodo’s large crop hinted at a pigeon relationship, since pigeons have a more developed crop than other birds. Pigeons usually lay very small clutches, and the dodo was said to lay a single egg. Like pigeons, the dodo lacked the vomer and nasal septum, and it shared details in the mandible, zygomatic bone, palate, and hallux. The dodo differed from other pigeons mainly in its small wings and large beak relative to the rest of the skull.

During the 19th century, several species were classified in the same genus as the dodo, including the Rodrigues solitaire and the Réunion solitaire, under the names *Didus solitarius* and *Raphus solitarius* (with *Didus* and *Raphus* being different names for the dodo genus used by various authors). An unusual 17th-century description of a dodo and bones found on Rodrigues—now known to belong to the Rodrigues solitaire—led Abraham Dee Bartlett to name a new species, *Didus nazarenus*, in 1852. Based on solitaire remains, it is now considered a synonym of that species. Crude drawings of the red rail of Mauritius were also mistaken for dodo species, leading to the names *Didus broeckii* and *Didus herberti*. For many years, the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire were placed in their own family, the Raphidae (formerly Dididae), because their exact relationships with other pigeons were unclear. Each was also sometimes placed in its own single-species family (Raphidae and Pezophapidae, respectively).