The dodo wasn’t as daffy a duck as we once thought.
Despite their dim reputation, evolutionary biologists have learned that the infamously extinct bird, hunted out of existence by humans in the 1600s, was impressively “exceptionally powerful,” according to new insights published last week in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
“Was the dodo really the dumb, slow animal we’ve been brought up to believe it was? The few written accounts of live dodos say it was a fast-moving animal that loved the forest,” said study author Mark Young, a researcher and professor at the University of Southampton in the UK.
The dodo’s evolutionary prominence came as the first species extinction ever observed by humans in real-time. The rotund, flightless birds met their ultimate predator when Dutch colonizers arrived on the island of Mauritius in 1598, liking to dine on the hapless dodo. It took only 70 years to wipe them out of existence, last seen in 1662, according to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
The story of the hapless dodo has long endured as a cautionary tale. To be called a dodo today is synonymous with ineptitude. Early researchers believed that the 3-foot-tall, 45-pound bird had too comfortable a life on the remote island without any predators, and blamed their unthreatened existence with stunting evolutionary progress.
The dodo was thus ripe for human intervention — and consumption.
Researchers began by myth-busting early accounts of dodo specimens, some of which are decidedly fictional. Once the true stories were parsed, they recategorized the dodo and a bird called the solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), which lived on the Mauritian island of Rodrigues, as close cousins, in the same family as pigeons and doves.
The newly identified association also helped repaint our vision of the dodo.
“Evidence from bone specimens suggests that the Dodo’s tendon which closed its toes was exceptionally powerful, analogous to [those of] climbing and running birds alive today,” study co-author Neil Gostling, an evolutionary biologist and university colleague. “These creatures were perfectly adapted to their environment.”
Meanwhile, the stunt-scientists at Colossal Biosciences are attempting to revive the long-dead avian species in a revolutionary effort to restabilize the ecosystem in Mauritius.
