The Dodo Blog

Primeval is a British science fiction drama television programme produced by Impossible Pictures for ITV. [...] The series follows a team of scientists who investigate anomalies in time and deal with the ancient creatures that come through, although they are not always prehistoric. The fantastic creatures on the Episode 4 of the series are Dodos!

The Dodos created for this episode are super cute and for a while you can almost forget they aren’t real. The series production did a great work “recreating” an animal that few people saw and that we have few registries. Remember that almost all those old paintings of dodos were made after the dodos were already extinct. Super cute dodos, but The dodos were depicted as fat and clumsy, as those bought to by sailors for zoos were due to overfeeding in captivity; real wild dodos would have been somewhat slimmer than shown in the show. That means the dodos of the episode are based on dodo paintings made in Europe.

There is a video excerpt of that Primeval episode with scenes with those dodos on YouTube. The video quality isn’t the best, but it worth. Bellow, the video and more dodo images from that episode.

Update: the original video was removed, but for you keep enjoying the dodos, I updated the embed bellow with the BBC’s excerpt (3:46min) of that episode.

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

Dodo statues at the Vanished Kingdom Park, Canada, by sssssssss.

From the PBS article about evolution by Gareth Huw Davies The Life of Birds: Birds arrived comparatively late.

Birds living on small islands are highly vulnerable to extinction. Many have become flightless in the absence of natural predators, and when man arrived, with rats, cats and other animals, the birds stand little chance. Over 90% of birds that have become extinct during historical times lived on islands.

The dodo is the tragic symbol of bird extermination. This large, flightless, turkey-sized pigeon lived on the tropical island of Mauritius. A fruit-eater, it had little reason to move fast or fly. It was easy prey for man the hunter.

The sailor Volquard Iversen, shipwrecked on Mauritius for 5 days in 1662, gave the last eye witness account. He wrote: “They were larger than geese but not able to fly. Instead of wings they had small flaps, but they could run very fast.” Not fast enough, though, for human hunters, Only fossils and a few preserved specimens remain to remind us of this tragic species.

One more nice page about dodos: Description of the Dodo bird (raphus cucullatus) from the Birds of Mauritius site. The page starts with the dodo “portrait” above and the Old Print of a Dodo:

The dodo was a flightless bird native only to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The dodo was a flightless member of the pigeon family. Fully grown dodos weighted about 23 kg (50 pounds). Around 1505 the Portuguese became the first Europeans to discover the dodo. By 1681 it had been driven to extinction by humans and the feral dogs, pigs, rats, and monkeys introduced by Europeans to Mauritius.

It talks a bit more about its history, the physical characteristics, natural history, including food habits, reproduction, habitat and behavior; and about the economic importance for humans, including the positive point and conservation, which means extinction. The “positive” description says:

The main purpose dodos served to humans, in the brief contact between the two species, was as food. The sailors frequently fed on wildlife from Mauritius while staying there, although it has been said that dodo meat was not particularly tasty. Still, they were hunted intensely, with sailors sometimes bringing back as many as 50 at a time. What they couldn’t eat right away they would salt and bring back with them. A few attempts were made to bring back a dodo alive. When this was successful, entrepreneurs would capitalize on the unique looks of the bird and tour the dodos around Europe, displaying them in cages and demonstrating how the dodo could “eat” stones. (Strickland and Melville, 1848) (Fuller, 1987)

I don’t want to copy all the text from the page, because it’s a good reference and I want people to visit it. The page also includes links to more dodo sites, scientific information, bibliography, and links to articles, included in the site. Almost all the articles were already blogged about here. I would like also to suggest their Images of the Dodo page.

Update: I removed all the links, since the whole site is gone and the links were broken.

Dodo by Wandys

The Sydney Morning Herald from Reuters: Missing bird species rediscovered.

A bird species that has not been seen since the remains of one were found in India 140 years ago is alive and living in Thailand, scientists say.

The live Large-billed Reed-warbler was found by chance by ornithologist Philip Round as he was putting identification tags on wild birds at a water treatment plant near Bangkok last year.

“Although reed-warblers are generally drab and look very similar, one of the birds I caught that morning struck me as very odd, something about it didn’t quite add up; it had a long beak and short wings,” he said in a statement.

“Then, it dawned on me – I was probably holding a Large-billed Reed-warbler. I was dumbstruck, it felt as if I was holding a living dodo,” he said.

(Thanks Arbee!)

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.

There are no dodos images, but it’s a very interesting news about Mauritius: Mauritius turns wildlife clock back 400 years from Reuters by Ed Harris:

Giant tortoises doze in the shade as rare lizards slip under bushes and endangered birds chatter in the sunlit trees overhead.

On a small wooded island off southern Mauritius, environmentalists are trying to turn back time to an era before humans ever set foot on the volcanic Indian Ocean archipelago.

“We want to turn the clock back 400 years,” says Ashok Khadun, a conservation expert with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF), a local non-governmental organisation.

Sadly, they are too late to help the Mauritius giant skink — a type of large grey lizard — its broad-billed parrot, scops owl or lesser flying fox, and many other species now extinct.

And, of course, the dodos:

But the arrival of Europeans led by the Portuguese in the 16th century triggered an ecological disaster with the slashing of forest habitats and the introduction of predators like rats.

By far the most famous victim was the flightless dodo bird, which is believed to have died out in the late 1600s.

Keep reading the news on Reuters page.

This is the new home of The Dodo Blog and I hope you enjoy. Please update your links to http://www.dodo.blog.br and your feed subscriptions to this one and this one, if you want to subscribe to the comments .

I made a few changes in the original template and in the CSS, got more plugins to this WordPress installation, added more links to organizations and imported all the entries, images and comments. Don’t worry. The old address will still working, but the main page will be redirect to this one.

I have tons of dodo things to blog here, books about dodos to review and new things to discover. If you have a blog about birds, nature or endangered species, let me know to link. I don’t do link exchange but I would be glad to link to non-profit organization like those. For now that all.

And to celebrate the new dodo homes, one of the new images in the English dodo article at Wikipedia: Reunion Dodo and other birds by Dutch artist Pieter Withoos.