The only known flesh and bone specimen remaining of the dodo, on display at Oxford University.Credit...Oxford University Museum of Natural History
The New York Times has an interesting article about the Dodo. The Dodo, Raphus cucullatus, was a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius. It was about the size of a male turkey. The Dodo has long been seen as and inept animal that slid into extinction because it was too stupid to survive. It went extinct in the 1700s due to sailors finding them delicious and easy to catch when they stopped over in Mauritius. Now, a paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society by Neil Gostling, a paleobiologist at the University of Southampton in England, sets the record straight. The Dodo was not who you think it was...
The new study reconfirmed that the dodo and the solitaire were columbids, members of the pigeon and dove family prized for their singular intelligence — an attribute that runs counter to the notion that the dodo was destined to die out because it was too stupid to survive. The researchers also concluded that there was just a single species of dodo (Raphus cucullatus) and solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria). They created a new family group name, Raphina subtribus nova, to unite the two birds.
Leon Claessens, a paleontologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who is not connected to the study, said the dodo was one of a select group of animals that had been named, classified and described often — probably too often. “The authors of the new paper make a valiant effort to hack through the nomenclatural thicket in which the dodo and the solitaire are hidden,” he said.
Genetic testing suggests that around 25 million years ago the two species shared a common Southeast Asian ancestor, which diverged about 12 million years ago into what became the dodo and the solitaire. Dr. Hume said that the ancestral species, which could fly, island-hopped along the emergent Mascarene Plateau, an undersea archipelago that extends about 1,200 miles, from the Seychelles in the north to Réunion in the south. The dodos evolved on Mauritius, which arose through volcanic activity some eight million years ago, and the solitaire stopped on Rodrigues, which popped up some 6.5 million years later.
Both birds were well adapted to their isolated habitats. The dodo’s large bill had a hooked tip that appears to have been its only real defense. (One 17th-century seaman called the dodo’s beak its “war weapon.”) Likewise, the clublike bone growths on the end of each solitaire wing were presumably used against other solitaires in turf wars. Absent mammalian predators, the dodo and solitaire, both fruit eaters, gradually began to fly less and walk more. In these resource-rich subtropical settings, their size increased so drastically that they lost their ability to fly.
