The Dodo Blog

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.

Birds – Illustration to the Baburnama: Loriquet (Coryllis vernalis), Horned Pheasant (Tragopan melanocephalus), Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), Ducks, and Partridges, circa 1620-1625, Institute of Oriental Studies. St. Petersburg. From Mughal Miniature Painting – An Alternative Source of History.

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.

Le Dodo by Mickaël Blanc, student of the École Émile Cohl.

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

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.