The Dodo Blog

Lantern slide of Alice in Wonderland, chapter 1, from EVE (Everyone’s Virtual Exhibition).

Ambulocetus vs. Dodo by ursulav. Don’t forget to read her comments about the drawing.

After the news by journalists, the news by specialists, not so much different from the others, from the Natural History Museum: Bones will reveal life of dodo:

The new finds will help to piece together the environment the dodo lived in and will help us understand more about how it become extinct.

Scientists hope to find the first complete articulated skeleton of an individual dodo. This will help reveal how the dodo moved around, whether they walked with a waddle or hopped with a skip.

That’s probably not so big news to make you go to the site, so here it is more arguments: images of the dodo in their Picture Library, Dodo model at the birds gallery, and, as they suggest “Take a Dodo architectural tour. The last one was my favourite part. It doesn’t have many texts, however there are two short and amusing videos: The Dodo’s changing image, with an analysis of “Dodo expert Julian Hume” about the famous painting by Roelandt Savery, and The Dodo – The merging of myth and reality a great interview with Julian Hume made in 2003.

Dodo from the Book of Birds by Wiliam F. Stecher

Hello and welcome to the dodo blog! This is a blog about dodos in the news, science, culture, art, history, biology, books, media and their influence in the modern culture. Why dodos? Among the extinct animals, the dodos are the most popular, they are icons, they are symbols, they are very famous, they are almost super-stars! But they are much better than super-stars: dodos don’t get drunk and fight with reports, dodos don’t use weird clothes that are going to be next tendency in fashion, dodos don’t make scandals and appear in the first page of a tabloid, dodos don’t expend their money with drugs or illegal substances, dodos don’t make stupid comments. Well, actually they don’t do anything more, because… they are dead. Extinct!

Poor little stupid and dead birds. I think that they deserve more love and that is one of the reasons of this blog. I created it to keep their memory alive, to keep alive the awful and massive power of the human being of destroy the nature, to share the dodo history, to show how popular they are nowadays, to show what people are saying about them and where you can find them. This is a homage blog to dodos.

However, if you never heard about them and have no idea about the Mauritius Islands, don’t worry, this is your lucky day. Wikipedia has a great Dodo article: the history, etymology, the sad end, other interesting information and pictures – of reconstructed Mauritius Dodos at museums. And what the hack the word dodo means? Nobody is sure about it:

The origin of the word “Dodo” is one of controversy. It is related to the Dutch word “dodaars” (referring to the feathers on its buttocks) the name of the little Grebe or Dabchick in the Dutch language. Probably not entirely because they shared a similar physical appearance (apart from the feathers on the buttocks), but because the dodo, like the little Grebe, couldn’t walk very well, making it an easy prey for Dutch sailors. Others believe it’s related to the archaic Portuguese word “doudo” meaning fool or simpleton. Yet another possibility, as author David Quammen has noted in his book “Song of the Dodo”, “that ‘dodo’ was an onomatopoeic approximation of the bird’s own call, a two-note pigeony sound like ‘doo-doo’.”

But how are we going to know now, since they killed all of them in less than one century? I’m still pissed angry about this, since the day I discovered that my changes to see a real dodo were zero. Anyway, back to the dodos, the dodo is the “star” of the article about extinct birds at Wikipedia and the Coat of arms of Mauritius has a dodo! (I’m not sure if those are good things, very sad or good but sad.) And, if you don’t know yet, Mauritius was the place that dodos lived before the Dutch discover how good they could it be as food.

Be prepare for a lot of images of dodos, a plenty of links and all the other information that I can find. All the links, suggestions and comments are welcome: feel free to do it and post any commens. My name is Bibi and I’m a dodo.