The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was an extinct flightless bird native to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. It was one of three species in the family Raphidae, usually placed with pigeons in the order Columbiformes, though sometimes separated as an order (Raphiformes). The other two species, also found on islands of the Indian Ocean, were the solitaires (Raphus solitarius of Réunion and Pezophaps solitaria of Rodrigues).
Illustration of a dodo bird.
The dodo is frequently cited as one of the most well-known examples of human-induced extinction and also serves as a symbol of obsolescence with respect to human technological progress. The birds were first seen by Portuguese sailors about 1507 and were exterminated by humans and their introduced animals. The dodo was extinct by 1681, the Réunion solitaire by 1746, and the Rodrigues solitaire by about 1790.
Physical Characteristics
The dodo, bigger than a turkey, weighed about 23 kg (about 50 pounds). It had blue-gray plumage, a big head, a 23-cm (9-inch) blackish bill with reddish sheath forming the hooked tip, small useless wings, stout yellow legs, and a tuft of curly feathers high on its rear end. The Réunion solitaire may have been a white version of the dodo. The brownish Rodrigues solitaire was taller and more slender, with smaller head, short bill lacking the heavy hook, and wings with knobs.
The Dodo's Demise: Unraveling the Truth
The dodo has long been seen as an iconic image of "our ability to just destroy things", says Neil Gostling, a palaeobiologist at the University of Southampton in the UK. But today, researchers like Gostling - and the occasional artist with a scientific eye, like Fawcett - are probing the past to uncover everything they can about the real dodo, from what it really looked like and behaved, to why it evolved as it did and how it ended up among the first human-caused extinctions in modern times.
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What they are discovering is firmly overturning the image of the dodo as a stupid, clumsy animal somehow destined for extinction. These scientists hope that finding out more about the dodo, and even scouring its genetics, could even help to address our current day extinction crisis.
The biggest misconception of the dodo is "that it's sort of fat, stupid and deserved to go extinct", says Gostling. "It wasn't. It was adapted to its environment, and it had been doing very well… The thing that it wasn't adapted to were rats, cats, pigs and goats, and obviously people."
It's now believed it was animals brought by sailors that ultimately caused the dodo's demise. "The dodo laid a single egg in a nest on the ground, which made these eggs particularly vulnerable to predation by introduced species like rats and pigs, which arrived on Mauritius at the same time as people," says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Rats would have also been serious competition for food, says Hume.
Dodos, like other birds on the island, appeared relatively unafraid of people, and were easy for humans to catch when out in the open. But accounts say that the dodo was incredibly agile when it got between the rocks and the trees and would apparently "stand upright and run incredibly fast, and you couldn't catch it", says Gostling. Modern-day research is backing this up.
Misconceptions and Reinterpretations
From the first encounter with dodos by Dutch sailors on the island of Mauritius in 1598 to their extinction a century later, there are plenty of depictions of this unusual ground-dwelling bird (which was, in fact, a large flightless pigeon). But disentangling truth from myth is tricky, especially when modern-day research has shown dodos were anything but the dumpy, clumsy, stupid birds so often represented.
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Before she began working on it in 2019, Fawcett spent years finding out all she could about the dodo. She soon learned that many depictions were best left avoided. Among them was the famous dodo painting by Dutch artist Roelant Savery, painted in the 1620s. "I can tell you, there's lots wrong with that," she says. "It's more [like a] swan", she says: pigeons don't have "this bulbous, sticky-out bit at the front" of the neck. "And the belly on it... it's just obese, basically."
Savery is thought to have worked off a bad taxidermy bird, and apparently wildly exaggerated some features, but his depiction became the world's most well-known dodo image. It was the basis for the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland dodo illustration in 1865, which propelled the dodo to even more fame in the Victorian era. "That [idea] continued to the present day," says Gostling. "You can ask anybody, they'll know what a dodo is, and they'll draw this round bird with a funny beak and waddly feet… And it's absolutely wrong."
A few apparently accurate - but less famous - contemporaneous depictions do exist, though. Some were drawn by a Dutch sailor in the first decades of the 1600s. "They are the best drawings ever of dodos, and they were the only drawings done on Mauritian soil," says Hume.
The drawings depict a more upright and slender bird than in Savery's paintings. Fawcett used these sketches to create her dodo's head, along with a replica of the mummified Oxford dodo's head and some cast skulls. Unlike some depictions, they also show a particularly hooked beak, says Fawcett (it's thought to have been a formidable weapon).
Adjusted physique to be more in line with science.
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In 2016, Hume and colleagues used laser surface scanning technology to digitally recreate - and correct the position of - the dodo skeleton housed in the Natural History Museum in Port Louis, Mauritius' capital. "I put the bones together, worked out the angles they would have been, and it brings the dodo up into that more upright, natural shape," he says.
Hume and Gostling also both say their ongoing (as-yet unpublished) analysis of dodo's ankle bones has shown it has large scars where apparently large tendons and ligaments were attached. “When we look at birds that have this giant tendon in their foot today… they're very fast runners, they're climbers," says Gostling. "And that's what the dodo was doing."
It all comes together to reveal that the dodo was likely much taller, slimmer, lighter and more upright than commonly thought, with relatively long, strong legs and robust limbs which allowed it to manoeuvre quickly in its dense, rocky forest habitat.
De-extinction Efforts
The dodo’s prominent role in bringing attention to the extinction of species, coupled with advances in genetics that could allow for its resurrection (de-extinction), have led scientists to consider the possibility of bringing the dodo back. The sequencing of the dodo genome by geneticists in 2022 reinvigorated this discussion as well as the ethical debate of using de-extinction techniques to alter natural history.
The biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences announced in 2025 that it had succeeded in growing primordial germ cells (that is, the precursors of gametes [sperm and egg cells]) from the Nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica), a close living relative of the dodo. The company plans to introduce these cells into chickens which have been genetically modified to carry them. Using this process, it expects to use these chickens as surrogates to produce a colony of pigeons from which gene edits can be made, which could result in offspring with dodo-like characteristics.
How to De-Extinct The Dodo Bird | Process Overview | Colossal Biosciences
Extant Dodo Remains
All that remains of the dodo is a head and foot at Oxford, a foot in the British Museum, a head in Copenhagen, and skeletons, more or less complete, in various museums of Europe, the United States, and Mauritius. Many bones of solitaires have also been preserved.
Taxonomy
The classification of the dodo is as follows:
- Family: Columbidae
- Genus: Raphus
- Extinct Species
The Dodo's Relations
The dodo's closest living relative today is the Nicobar pigeon which lives across South East Asia and looks decidedly unlike the dodo. But historically its closest relative was the Rodrigues solitaire - an even larger flightless pigeon found on the nearby island of Rodrigues, known to have used its wings as weapons. A similar confusion to the dodo surrounded the solitaire, which never made it to Europe and went extinct sometime in the 19th Century.
The dodo's closest living relative today is the Nicobar pigeon.
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