What Was the Dodo? An Extinction Within a Century of Discovery

The dodo, Raphus cucullatus, was a bird about a metre tall and 10 to 18 kilograms in weight, with a large hooked beak, a fat body, small wings and a tuft of tail feathers, descended from pigeons that had flown to Mauritius from Southeast Asia several million years earlier and, on an island with no mammals and no ground predators, had lost the need to fly and grown large. Its nearest living relative, found by DNA in 2002, is the Nicobar pigeon of the Indian Ocean, and its nearest extinct one was the solitaire of the neighbouring island of Rodrigues, which went the same way a century later. It ate fallen fruit, nuts and seeds on the forest floor, nested on the ground, and laid, as far as the accounts say, a single egg, which is what an animal with no predators can afford and what doomed it when predators arrived.

The sailors ate dodos, though they preferred other things, and the hunting alone would probably not have finished a bird spread across an island 65 kilometres long. What did was the ship's company:

• •Rats, which came ashore from the first ships and ate the eggs and chicks of a ground-nesting bird that had never needed to defend a nest
• •Pigs, released to breed as food for later ships, which rooted through the forest floor and ate eggs, chicks and the fruit the dodos lived on
• •Crab-eating macaques, brought from Java as pets and released, which also took eggs
• •Dogs and cats, which hunted the adults
• •Forest clearance, once the Dutch settled the island in 1638, which removed the habitat, so that by the 1660s the birds survived only on offshore islets

A Dutch sailor, Volkert Evertsz, described in 1662 catching dodos on an islet off the east coast after a shipwreck, driving them together so that they could be taken by hand, and that is the last certain sighting; a hunting record of 1688 may refer to another bird. The species was gone by 1700, and because no one had thought to preserve it properly, what remained in Europe was a few paintings, most of them of an overfed captive, a head and a foot in Oxford, and a scattering of bones. The Oxford specimen, the only one with soft tissue, was a stuffed bird that decayed and was mostly discarded in 1755, which is why the dodo's appearance was reconstructed for two centuries from paintings of a bird that had been kept in a cage and fed too well; the wild dodo was slimmer and more upright than the round figure of the illustrations.

The dodo was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. Bones dug from a marsh on Mauritius in 1865 gave the first skeletons, and the same year Lewis Carroll, who stammered and introduced himself as Do-do-Dodgson, put the bird into Alice in Wonderland, awarding prizes after the Caucus race, and it became the most famous extinct animal after the dinosaurs. It also became the argument: the dodo was the first case in which people could see that a species had been destroyed by human action within living memory, and it entered the language as the type of the finished, dead as a dodo, at the moment when Darwin and Wallace were explaining how species arose and it was becoming clear how they could be ended. Every island extinction since, the great auk, the passenger pigeon, the Hawaiian honeycreepers, has been told with the dodo as the pattern.

The island lost most of its unique birds and reptiles in the same centuries, and the ones that remain, the pink pigeon, the Mauritius kestrel, the echo parakeet, were brought back from a few dozen individuals each by captive breeding and the removal of rats from offshore islets, in one of the most successful rescue programmes in conservation. The tambalacoque tree, whose seeds were once claimed to germinate only after passing through a dodo, turned out to manage without, though its decline is real. A biotechnology company announced in 2023 that it intended to bring the dodo back by editing the genome of the Nicobar pigeon, and the ecologists who work on Mauritius have pointed out that the rats, the pigs and the monkeys are still there, and that the island the dodo would return to is not the one it left.

The dodo was a metre-tall flightless pigeon of Mauritius, descended from birds that flew there and lost the need to fly on an island without predators, which laid a single egg on the ground and could not survive the rats, pigs, monkeys, dogs and clearance that Dutch ships brought after 1598; it was gone by about 1662, and its remains were so neglected that its very existence was doubted until bones were dug up in 1865. It became the first extinction people saw and the emblem of every one since.