The Dodo Blog

Dodo Skeleton Found on Island, May Yield Extinct Bird’s DNA by Kate Ravilious for National Geographic News:

Adventurers exploring a cave on an island in the Indian Ocean have discovered the most complete and well-preserved dodo skeleton ever found, scientists reported yesterday.

Researchers say the find would likely yield the first useful samples of the extinct, flightless bird’s DNA.

If you follow this blog, you know I already linked to the same news on the posts Bones Could Yield Dodo DNA and Flightless Fred has scientists in raptures. However, that National Geographic article is good, as usual, and there more additional information on it.

Until now most of the information about dodos has come from scattered bone fragments. Only one other full skeleton was ever unearthed—in the 1860s—but it has been of limited scientific value, because the person who discovered it never revealed where it was found.

“We need to know about the location to understand the ecology of the dodo,” said Kenneth Rijsdijk, a scientist with Geological Survey of the Netherlands, who plans to study the environment in which the newfound bird was discovered.

The site of the new dodo skeleton and the layout of its bones has been precisely recorded, making the find already very useful to scientists, he added.

“We can take soil samples and discover how and why the animal got there,” Rijskijk said.

What’s more, the location of the new skeleton makes it much more likely to yield DNA, said Beth Shapiro, a geneticist from Oxford University who studies dodo remains. [...]

The cave site of the new skeleton is likely to provide the best hope of a decent DNA sample because the bones will not have been exposed to sunlight and the temperature was fairly constant, she added.

“We are really excited about the new find and hope it might tell us much more about the behavior and appearance of dodos,” Shapiro said.

PS.: Photograph from Reuters, inset illustration from Getty Images.

Paysage avec oiseaux (1628) by the Flemish painter Roelandt Savery.

I love the thought of these characters from various fairy-tales living in a perpetual state of wanting to relive their big moment. . .the 15 min of fame – if you will. Always on the lookout for another child to come around and play.

Recruiting A New Alice by tartx.

Dodo by Wandys

From LiveScience Bones Could Yield Dodo DNA: A newly discovered dodo skeleton has raised hopes for extracting some of the legendary extinct bird’s DNA.

Fred the dodo

Late last year, biologists looking for cave cockroaches accidentally discovered a dodo skeleton in the highlands of Mauritius.

Nicknamed “Fred” after one of its discoverers, the skeleton’s bones were badly decomposed and fragile, but there is still a good chance of extracting some dodo DNA because of the stable temperature and dry to slightly humid environment (keys to DNA preservation) of the cave.

(Scientists think Fred ended up in the bottom of the cave because he sought shelter from a violent cyclone but fell down in a deep hole and could not climb out.)

Dodo DNA would be of great scientific value because scientists know very little about the genetics of the dodo. Also, it would allow scientists to figure how long the skeleton was lying in the cave.

Keep reading on LiveScience.

The Dodo Lives from Toronto Life, November 1975. (via Torontoist)

Dodos just in the name, but since it’s about extinction is interesting: ‘Dodo atlas’ helps to put extinction of species on map from Times Online:

AN ATLAS of the world’s extinction hot spots, in which at least one species is in imminent danger of dying out, has been drawn up by scientists to guide global conservation.

The map, prepared by researchers from the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE), pinpoints 595 clearly defined sites that provide either the only or major remaining habitat for an endangered or seriously endangered species. Only a third of the hot spots are currently protected as conservation areas, and most are surrounded by large human populations that are threatening their future. [...]

Taylor Ricketts, a scientist from the World Wide Fund for Nature, the environmental charity, who led the research, said: “We now know where the emergencies are: the species that will be tomorrow’s dodos unless we act quickly. The good news is we still have time to protect them.”

In the study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Dr Ricketts’s team used the World Conservation Union’s “red list” of threatened species to pick out mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and conifers that are acutely endangered and have a very narrow geographical range.

The research threw up 595 sites as priority hot spots, in which one or more species — 794 in total — is in danger and exists nowhere else in significant numbers. There are particular concentrations of hot spots in the Andes of South America, the Atlantic forest region of Brazil, the Caribbean and Madagascar. Mexico has the most hot spots, with 63, while there are 48 in Colombia, 39 in Brazil and 29 in Indonesia. [...]

Not only about dodos: Wish you were here (a small sampling):

Estimates vary, but roughly 50,000 animal and plant species become extinct each year. That’s over 130 per day, about 6 per hour.

Here’s a fun game to improve your math and reading skills (both come in handy when taking tests like the SATs): Time yourself as you read the list below and calculate how many species that were still around when you began reading have since become history. (Liberals are advised to read quickly so less species are gone by the time they’re done.)

This text is followed by a huge and sad list of extinct animals and a video. It also link to The Extinction Website, that has images and information about many of those animals that we won’t see anymore.

Mar de lágrimas by Savery. (via Hugo Strikes Back)

The image above is part of the February month of the 2007 Ivory Bill Wildlife Calendars.