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Dodos were fast, active birds that roamed their forested island home
Since last being sighted in 1662, the dodo has become the symbol of extinction.
But despite their fame, astonishingly little is known about these large, flightless birds. A team of scientists are now attempting to change this, revealing in the process that dodos were active, fast birds that thrived on Mauritius before being driven to extinction.
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 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 the ‘type specimen’, the name given to the first-collected individual from which a species is defined.
As a result, over the last 400 years there has been a lot of confusion over the dodo and a closely related species 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 about – they were even considered mythical at one point.
In an effort to try and solve some of these questions, a team of scientists from the University of Southampton, the Natural History Museum, London and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History have undertaken one of the most in-depth review of these birds to date. This included going back through all the historic literature and specimens that have been collected.
We have very few contempory specimens of dodo, with most modern skeletons made up of bones from lots of individuals. ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Dr Neil Gostling is a palaeobiologist from the University of Southampton who was part of this team.
“This was a time before the scientific principles and systems we rely on to label and classify a species were in place,” explains Neil. “Both the dodo and the solitaire were gone before we had a chance to understand what we were looking at.”
“Before this, it hadn’t been thought possible for human beings to influence ‘God’s creation’ in such a way.”
Their initial results looking at the classification of the dodo and solitaire, and where they fit into the evolutionary tree of life, have been published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Mythical animals
When Dutch sailors first arrived on the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues, they encountered a couple of birds unlike any seen elsewhere: the dodo and the solitaire.
Both these birds were large, flightless forest-dwelling animals. They were only found on two islated islands in the southern Indian Ocean, with the dodo living on Mauritius and the lesser-known solitaire found on Rodrigues.
Whilst these Dutch travellers were not the first to land on the islands, which had been visited by Arabian and Portuguese ships, they decided to settle. The sailors started to hunt the dodo and solitaire, which due to their isolated lives were unafraid of the hunters. This massively reduced their number, but it was menagerie of creatures the sailors brought with them, including dogs, cats, pigs and rats, that sealed the birds’ fate.
Within just a few hundred years, both the dodo and the solitaire were extinct.
The lesser-known solitaire was another species of giant flightless pigeon that evolved instead on the island of Rodrigues. ©Julian Pender Hume
Today we know that both species evolved from pigeon-like ancestors. But back then the lack of specimens, unusual descriptions and reliance on observations from settlers and sailors meant that the two birds became something of a myth.
This was noted by the Victorian ornithologist Hugh Edwin Strictland who in 1848 wrote: “So rapid and so complete was their extinction that the vague descriptions given of them [dodo and 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.”
A number of different species of dodo were described from these accounts, with little understanding of how they may have looked or evolved. Over the past 400 years, this confusion surrounding the birds has meant that their place on the evolutionary tree has frequently been discussed.
It is this confusion that the researchers are attempting to settle.
“More has been written about the dodo than any other bird, yet virtually nothing is known about it in life,” says Dr Julian Hume, an avian palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum and coauthor of the paper.
“Based on centuries of nomenclatural confusion, and some 400 years after its extinction, the dodo and solitaire continue to prompt heated debate. We’ve gone from where the first statements were made, seen how these have developed, and identified various rabbit holes to correct the record, as best we can.”
We now know more than ever what the dodo likely looked like in life. © Karen Fawcett
Rethinking the dodo
By going back through the literature, including hundreds of accounts dating back as far as 1598, the researchers were able to establish that the dodo and solitaire were indeed members of the dove and pigeon family. They were also able to confirm that all the additional species that had been described over the centuries were wrong.
But it has also allowed the scientists to challenge some of our misconceptions for these extinct animals.
Inaccurate descriptions and drawings of the dodo have historically rendered them as fat, slow, flightless birds that lumbered around the island, almost willing their own extinction. Recent scientific evidence has now challenged this.
For example, it is now known that they were actually much leaner than has been depicted, and may have had much darker feathers. This latest project is also changing how we think they behaved.
“Evidence from bone specimens suggests that the dodo’s tendon which closed its toes was exceptionally powerful, analogous to climbing and running birds alive today,” explains Neil. “The dodo was almost certainly a very active, very fast animal.”
This new paper marks the start of a wider project that wants to further understand and contextualise the biology of these extinct birds. By piecing together how they lived and behaved, they hope to not only investigate the past, but also look to the future.
“Dodos held an integral place in their ecosystems,” says Neil. “If we understand them, we might be able to support ecosystem recovery in Mauritius, perhaps starting to undo the damage that began with the arrival of humans nearly half a millennium ago.”
