We have to rely on old pictures and the few bones and skins we have left - like the ones we have on display in the Museum. Reasons for extinction: The dodo only lived on one island - Mauritius. When sailors arrived in the sixteenth century they found that the dodo was very easy to catch, and even though it didn't taste very nice, many were eaten.
The dodo's natural habitat was almost completely destroyed after people started settling on Mauritius. A mythical creature? From right after their extinction and up until the 19th century, dodos were considered by most scientists as a mythical creature - as real as griffin or unicorn - as there seemed to be no conclusive evidence of their existence.
For the French that took possession of the island, the dodos seemed no more than the product of excessive imagination. Only in the early 19th century did European naturalists begin to see dodos across various museum collections. Thus the animal was recognized as a real, if extinct, creature. Carroll frequently visited the Oxford Museum of Natural History.
Dodos have become an icon of extinction caused by human action, and act as a warning to us for the future. Was the dodo fat? Few complete dodo skeletons exist, so it is quite difficult to know exactly what they looked like. Their extinction was so rapid that they unfortunately left little trace of their existence.
Interpretations of the appearance of the dodo have varied over the centuries. While the testimonies of travelers all describe the dodo as having plumage ranging from black to dark gray, Dutch painters of the 17th century represented them with a bright plumage, perhaps confusing them with another animal on the island. Other studies suggested that the weight depended on the season, and that individuals were fat during cool seasons, but less so during hot ones. Discover more from the weird and wonderful natural world in Cabinet of Curiosities.
Or continue your voyage into the Natural History project here. Aerial View Mauritius - Biennale Arte The thing is, Portuguese sailors are also said to have seen the bird, decades before this in 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 , 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. 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.
However, the commonly accepted image of the dodo, one of an overweight, dumpling of a bird, is likely false. In reconstructions of recently found bones, 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. Want to gain some daily interesting knowledge?
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