The false reputation of the dodo bird is being rewritten by evolutionary scientists: ‘extremely powerful’

The dodo was not as sharp a duck as we once thought.

Despite their lackluster reputation, evolutionary biologists have learned that the notoriously extinct bird, hunted out of existence by humans in the 1600s, was remarkably “extremely robust,” 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 the living dodo 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 significance came as the first species extinction ever observed by humans in real time. The round, flightless birds met their ultimate predator when Dutch colonists arrived on the island of Mauritius in 1598, wanting to dine on the hapless dodo. It took just 70 years to wipe them out of existence, last seen in 1662, according to Oxford University’s Natural History Museum.

The story of the unlucky dodo has long endured as a cautionary tale. Being called a dodo today is synonymous with incompetence. Early researchers believed that the 3-meter-long, 45-kilogram bird lived a very comfortable life on the remote island without any predators and blamed their unthreatened existence on stalled evolutionary progress.

The dodo was thus ripe for human intervention – and consumption.

Researchers began with early mythic accounts of dodo specimens, some of which are ultimately fictional. After analyzing the true stories, they recategorized the dodo and a bird called the diamondback (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 for dodo.

“Evidence from bone specimens suggests that the Dodo’s tendon that closed the toes was extremely powerful, similar to [those of] climbing and running of birds alive today,” study co-author Neil Gostling, an evolutionary biologist and fellow at the university. “These creatures were perfectly adapted to their environment.”

Meanwhile, stunt scientists at Colossal Biosciences are trying to revive long-dead bird species in a revolutionary effort to restore the ecosystem in Mauritius.