The Dodo Blog

From the Dodo Expedition Weblog: Distressed dodo and first impressions, by Ranjith Jayasena and Beth Shapiro.

The Mare aux Songes excavation has resulted in an enormous amount of finds. The many bones need to be washed, photographed and catalogued. Therefore a part of the team is staying at the base processing the finds while the others are busy to get themselves dirty in the field. Today Julian went through the collection of bones uncovered by Kenneth, Frans and Pieter in the Mare aux Songes last October. Apart from dodos and tortoises the faunal assemblage proved to contain several other (extinct) species. By analysing animal bones we get to know the different species that lived at the Mare aux Songes, as well as the age and health of these animals. Among last year’s finds were two fused vertebra of a dodo. Although it is not possible to say whether the bird got this as a result of a disease or old age, we can be sure that it must have suffered.

From BBC News Dodo skeleton find in Mauritius: Scientists say they have discovered part of the skeleton of a dodo, the large, flightless bird which became extinct more than 300 years ago.

“It’s a wonderful collection,” said Dr Julian Hume, a research associate with London’s Natural History Museum and a member of the largely Dutch-Mauritian team.

“The chances of a single (intact) bone being preserved [would be] a remarkable event; and here we have a whole collection of them,” the Reuters news agency quoted him as saying.

Dr Hume said previous bones had been plucked out in a haphazard way, with little attention given to adjacent dodo fossils or clues about the birds’ environment.

The find includes a complete hip and four leg bones (femur, fibula, tibiotarsus and hypotarsus). Numerous other dodo parts were also unearthed, such as skull fragments, beak bones, vertebrae, wing bones and toe bones.

The same news can also be read at ABC News with a different text or in your favourite journal, since I saw that this is in everywhere. Read also those “old” news, also from BBC: Scientists pinpoint dodo’s demise. Dodos for everybody!

PS.: Thanks to Chris and Jaime for having remembered my dodo blog and sent me the link.

Update: the ABC News link is no longer available, so I removed it.

RNW: The dodo hunters by Marnie Chesterton: An international team of scientists are, as I write this, standing in a swamp in Mauritius, looking for dodo bones. They have gone out to excavate a mass dodo grave, uncovered in November by a team of Dutch scientists, led by geoscientist Dr Kenneth Rijsdijk.

Dodos’ extinction continues to have impacts. In 1973, a scientist suggested that the Mauritian tree, the Calvaria or Tambalacoque, was dying out because it had entrusted its reproductive future with the dodo. Seeds from the tree needed to pass through the gut of the dodo before they would sprout.

The Calvaria, a hardwood species, were able to survive for 300 years without the bird but nearly went the same way as the dodo. An ornithologist came to the rescue with turkeys. Seeds from the last 13 trees were fed turkeys, and were suitably digested to start growing into seedlings. However the science behind this story, like so many stories that surround the dodo, is considered unreliable.

Yes, the same news of other days, but her text is very good there are some interesting additional information, – as you can see above -, images and an audio interview (link at the beginning at the text as Real audio or Windows Media).

Old news (December 2005″) from BBC News: Scientists find ‘mass dodo grave’: Scientists have discovered the “beautifully preserved” bones of about 20 dodos at a dig site in Mauritius.

A team of Dutch and Mauritian scientists discovered the bones in a swampy area near a sugar plantation on the south-east of the island.

The bones were said to have been recovered from a single layer of earth, with the prospect of further excavations to come.

I think that they already started this New Dodo expedition. More about it in the previous posts: Scientists to dig up dodo data, Scientists on the hunt for how dodo died and Dodo Expeditie Weblog

Naturalis, the site of the National Museum of Natural History of Netherlands created a weblog to keep the people informed about new Dodo expedition:

Leiden, 29 May 2006 On Friday, 2 June 2006, an international research team will depart for a 32-day expedition to Mauritius. This expedition will follow up Dutch scientists major find in autumn 2005 of a unique treasure trove of exceptionally rare Dodo remains. The purpose of the current expedition is to reconstruct the world of the Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) before Western man set foot on the island of Mauritius and wiped out the species. The expedition will seek to clarify the Dodos ecotope and explain why it became extinct.

The blog is called Dodo Expeditie Weblog and it has almost daily updates with interesting information of what this group of international multidisciplinary team composed by geologists, palaeontologists, botanists, sedimentologists, palynologists, ancient DNA specialists and archaeologists are doing to discover Who or what killed the Dodo. I loved that and I suggest to you sign the blog as I did. Don’t worry, you can chose the English version if your Dutch is so good as mine.

The same news of other day: Scientists to dig up dodo data by Discovery Reports Canada:

Dutch and British researchers just announced a plan to unearth new information on the iconic bird that represents extinct animals everywhere.

Leaders of the Dodo Research Program will go to Mauritius (a remote island in the Indian Ocean) to investigate a mass grave full of remains belonging to the long-extinct flightless bird.

The article has more info about what the scientists now about the dodo and what they don’t know and, the best part, there is a link to an old video: Dodo DNA with animations and an interview! Cool!

Update: the news page and the video are no longer available.

From the ABC News Online Scientists on the hunt for how dodo died.:

Scientists in Mauritius have launched a project to discover why the giant dodo bird became extinct.

Most theories blame settlers who found the plump flightless bird on the Indian Ocean island in the 16th century and began to hunt it relentlessly.

In an attempt to provide a scientific answer, the Dodo Research Program plans to study fossils from a mass dodo grave unearthed in southern Mauritius last October and an adjacent site, using carbon dating techniques and DNA analysis.