The Dodo Blog

Announce baby (Faire part bebe) by Marty-Crouz on deviantART.
I thought that lovely baby dodo would it be very appropriated to celebrate a new year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A long long time ago Stefan Scheer from Düsseldorf sent me an e-mail with a very nice surprise:

Hello, Dodoblog!

Inspired by the dodo´s sad story and the will to keep it´s memory alive we sent out about 3.000 christmasdodos on Christmas.

We hope you like them!

So, he sent me 4 pages in PDf with the dodo story and pages to make my own Christmas dodo. My German isn’t very good (=it’s really really bad), but the instructions to make your own it are easy, and you can make it today. You just need to grab the PDF with the pages Christmas Dodo papercraft here.

That’s a little (re-passed) gift to all the dodos fans around the world be able to celebrate  holidays with our so much loved bird. I hope you enjoy it!

Happy Holidays to all!

Running Slowly by Leah Palmer Preiss, aka Curious Art. I loved it!

According to my trusty 1878 Chambers’s Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, “The birds were easily killed, being wholly unable to fly, and running slowly. Their speedy extinction after the islands began to be visited and settled, is thus easily accounted for.”

Maybe it was the shoes?

Acrylic on text & map of Mauritius, 4×5″

Dead Dutch Authors as Dodo Birds: paper mache dodo birds made from the writing of obscure, dead, Dutch authors, 6″ long, $1500. By Alain Douglas Park.

An early version of the scanned dodo rendered by project research technician Abby Drake and students in Leon Claessens’ lab.

From PhysOrg, The way of the digital dodo: The laser light glowed brilliant red, forming a moving line as it bounced information from the dodo’s bones back into the high-tech scanner sitting on a tripod on the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s (MCZ) fifth floor.

Again and again, the red line traced the contours of the skeletal bird, one of just a handful of complete skeletons of one of the world’s most famous cases of human-caused extinction.

The flightless bird, about the size of a large turkey, was native to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. It became extinct in the mid- to late-1600s from a combination of human hunting, habitat destruction, and predation by introduced animals, including rats, cats, pigs, and dogs.

The laser’s tracings were creating a 3-D digital model of the skeleton, compiled as part of a joint effort between the MCZ’s ornithological collection, overseen by Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Scott Edwards, and Holy Cross College biologist Leon Claessens, an assistant professor whose doctoral work at Harvard and familiarity with the MCZ’s collections led to the collaboration. Claessens received his doctorate in 2006.

The National Science Foundation-funded, three-year effort aims to create 3-D digital models of each species represented in Harvard’s collection of 12,000 bird skeletons. It will make those digital models available on the Internet for researchers around the world. The collection’s digitization will not only vastly expand access to the collections for researchers who can’t afford to travel to Cambridge, it will also make analysis of the specimens far more rapid, using powerful engineering software that creates thousands of data points on each bone that can be manipulated, measured, and used in calculations.

“This project will be useful for people studying the basic morphology of birds,” Edwards said. “In this era of genomics, the size and shape of bones is still very important.”

Claessens, who has been scanning with a group of his students since the “Aves 3D” project got under way in August, said much of the effort is aimed at disarticulated bones of specimens, so that the scanner can image the entire bone, including the ends and surfaces that might not be accessible in an assembled specimen. Researchers interested in the shape and size of a particular bone across different species will be able to call up those bones digitally, rather than traveling to individual museums with calipers, pencil, pad, and camera, as would be required today. Those interested in other aspects of anatomy can manipulate the bones digitally, even reassembling the bird if needed.

Keep reading on PhysOrg.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations by Maxim Mitrofanov, translated by N. Demurovoy from the LiveJournal Таpirr. (via ofellabuta – NSFW)

Dodo napkin by Allison.

This was the best April Fools’ joke I’ve ever seen, with dodos: Dodo: Web-based time machine! by Aviary.

We’ve been working feverishly around the clock on this new tool which will allow you to age and de-age people, places and things from any browser with Flash 9 enabled.

Here’s a video of Dodo in action:

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I saw some pictures of that wooden dodo on Flickr and I was curious to know where all those people were getting the dodos. I’m not sure about all, but MUJI was selling those dodos and the cute wooden animals toys on the session Toys and Children’s Gifts. Too bad I’m late, they are very pretty.

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A friend, Avi Alkalay, was in Belgium last year and took those pictures of a store in Bruges (Brugge), Belgium. It’s probably some jewellery, but I couldn’t find any additional information about it. Maybe if I knew some words in Dutch I could had better – any – results. Anyway, a store called dodo with a dodo logo is cool enough, and I’m going to discover something one day, with some luck. Thanks for the photos Avi!

Update: Allison solved the mystery: the store is Dodo. It looks so cool that it deserves its own post. Stay tuned! Thanks again Allison!