The dodo, or Raphus cucullatus if you want to get fancy, is an
extinct species of flightless bird that was native to the tiny island
nation of Mauritius before it sadly died out. But enough of the
Discovery Channel stuff, you’re reading this to find out how this sucker
went extinct. And the answer is, well, complicated.
It’s commonly believed that the dodo went extinct because Dutch
sailors ate the beast to extinction after finding that the bird was
incredibly easy to catch due to the fact it had no fear of humans, (why
it didn’t fear the creature many times its size is a mystery for another
day). This is, for the for the most part, pretty accurate. It is noted
that after sailors landed and settled on the islain1958, the dodo’s population rapidly declined and other sources confirm
that the dodo was indeed hunted by sailors looking for an easy snack,
since the dodo’s ungainly gait and lack of a third axis of movement made
it relatively easy to catch.
However, in this paper released by the Oxford University of Natural History,
it’s the animals the sailors brought with them that are named as one of
the key reasons our hapless feathery friend saw his demise. Pigs, dogs
and rats are all animals said to have developed a taste for dodo eggs;
this introduction of such animals into a foreign ecosystem, combined
with humans hunting and eating them, saw the delicate balance the dodo
had enjoyed for so long destroyed. The species was soon cripplingly
endangered. And as a result, it faded from existence.
The exact date we humans came into contact with the dodo is up for
debate, Dutch sailors traveling with Jacob van Neck (one of the first
people to ever describe the dodo) are said to have been the first humans
to have seen the bird in 1958. The thing is, Portuguese sailors are also said to have seen the birddecades before this in 1507.
This is just one of many facts about the dodo that still doesn’t have
a clear answer. For example, the date the bird officially went extinct
is as muddled as the date it was first discovered. The Oxford University
link above states that the dodo was extinct by 1680, a fact that is
echoed in many other sources; however, scientists plotting the last
known sightings of the bird on a graph suggest that the actual date is
10 years later than this estimate. On the other hand, as noted in the book.
Funnily enough, despite being one of the most famous extinct animals
of all time, right up there with the wooly mammoth, no one actually
knows exactly what the dodo looked like. As noted in this articleby BBC,
complete skeletons for the animal are incredibly rare, one of the last
was destroyed in a fire in 1755; hell, even the model in the natural history Museum is a composite of various specimens and they’re the people literally tasked with documenting and storing animal remains.
However, the commonly accepted image of the dodo, one of an overweight, dumpling of a bird, is likely false. In reconstructed recently founded bone
it would appear that the dodo was actually a lot sleeker and agile than
the artists of the past gave it credit for. Oddly enough, the cliched
image of an overweight dodo stems all the way back to when they were
first spotted, though images of thinner dodos are known to exist
(including ones sketched by Jacob Van Neck who was one of the first to
sketch them); but these are vastly outnumbered by ones of dodos looking
like they lived on a diet of nothing but sticks of butter mixed with
bacon grease. A suggested reason for this disparity is seasonal fat changes, though like with everything else to do with the dodo, no one is exactly sure if this is the case.
In keeping with this theme of no one being exactly sure about anything
to do with the dodo, even the word “dodo” itself has contestation to
its routes. The three main candidates are either, the Dutch word “dodoor“, the Portugese word, “duodo“, or our personal favourite, the Dutch word, “dodaars” which roughly translates as . The other two words translate to “sluggard” and “fool” in their respective languages, but since sailors aren’t exactly known for the eloquence, “knot-arse” seems as likely as anything.
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