The dodo wasn’t as daffy a duck as we once thought.
Despite their dim fame, evolutionary biologists have learned that the infamously extinct bird, hunted out of existence by humans within the 1600s, was impressively “exceptionally powerful,” in response to recent insights published last week within the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
“Was the dodo really the dumb, slow animal we’ve been brought as much as imagine it was? The few written accounts of live dodos say it was a fast-moving animal that loved the forest,” said study creator Mark Young, a researcher and professor on the University of Southampton within the UK.
The dodo’s evolutionary prominence got here as the primary species extinction ever observed by humans in real-time. The rotund, flightless birds met their ultimate predator when Dutch colonizers arrived on the island of Mauritius in 1598, liking to dine on the hapless dodo. It took only 70 years to wipe them out of existence, last seen in 1662, in response to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
The story of the hapless dodo has long endured as a cautionary tale. To be called a dodo today is synonymous with ineptitude. Early researchers believed that the 3-foot-tall, 45-pound bird had too comfortable a life on the distant island with none predators, and blamed their unthreatened existence with stunting evolutionary progress.
The dodo was thus ripe for human intervention — and consumption.
Researchers began by myth-busting early accounts of dodo specimens, a few of that are decidedly fictional. Once the true stories were parsed, they recategorized the dodo and a bird called the solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), which lived on the Mauritian island of Rodrigues, as close cousins, in the identical family as pigeons and doves.
The newly identified association also helped repaint our vision of the dodo.
“Evidence from bone specimens suggests that the Dodo’s tendon which closed its toes was exceptionally powerful, analogous to [those of] climbing and running birds alive today,” study co-author Neil Gostling, an evolutionary biologist and university colleague. “These creatures were perfectly adapted to their environment.”
Meanwhile, the stunt-scientists at Colossal Biosciences try to revive the long-dead avian species in a revolutionary effort to restabilize the ecosystem in Mauritius.
