The Dodo Blog

Marcello Cazzaniga sent me a nice e-mail with 2 those lovely dodo images:

I am Marcello from Italy I always follow your blog, I love Dodo.
I play figure ice skating in Italy, with some other adults like me …we are not so artistic so we use to call us Dodo group, because we are near to the extinction
But our motto is “I can’t fly but I can slide”.
I send you some images of some dodos that I designed for some pins and cards.
I hope you will appreciate them.

Sure I did! And thanks for sharing them Marcello.

I don’t like beer, but hard to ignore the Bourbon beer, from Réunion Islands, also known as La Dodo for having a lovely dodo as the logo. However, there is something even better than the logo of La Dodo, the ads:

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Dead Dutch Authors as Dodo Birds: paper mache dodo birds made from the writing of obscure, dead, Dutch authors, 6″ long, $1500. By Alain Douglas Park.

Harri’s dodos in the bedroom, protecting them while they sleep. Kristiina’s Housewarming photographed by Joshua Bousel.

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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Unbeknownst to most ornithologists, the dodo was actually a very advanced species, living alone quite peacefully, until, in the 17th century, it was annihilated by men, rats, and dogs. As usual.

Dodos photoshop version of Gary Larson’s Dodos, made by h2oscienceguy081

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

It’s a scene from the movie Ice Age, in which a pair of dodos keenly observes the fact that the last of the females have been killed. “Extinction of the Dodo” by E. Willoughby.

Do you remember the Dodo Expeditie Weblog? They are back with back. Or I rather say, they were back with the Dodo excavation 2007, because it ended in August 19th. The expedition was documented in a blog, as the previous one, with English and Dutch. The Dutch has a link the images of the new mascot Dido.

The expedition started with a fantastic new discover in its first day, July 29:

As soon as we set foot on Mauritius we headed for an excursion into the vast system of lavatunnels on the hilly side of the island. In the shadow of Julian Hume we entered a cave where speleologists discovered a complete dodoskeleton, only a month ago. This would be the first ever discovered in the Mauritian highlands. Soon it pointed out that also we would be lucky in the catacombs. In the smal chamber where the dodoskeleton was found Julain discovered the pelvis of the extinct Mauritian owl (Mascarenotus sauzieri)! Before this moment nobody knew this part of the postcranial skeleton of this species, it simply never was found. The Mauritian owl was the size of a forest owl, but had much bigger paws to kill reptiles. A most important find. How did the dodo and the owl ended in the cave, and how did they enter? Questions that immediately came to our minds and that we hopefully can answer with future research.

There are more information (and images) about this last expedition on their weblog posts. Check also the links on the main page of the expedition, including the Research plan. But before, a couple of Dido images:

Unable to resist the small bug-eyed dodo-fish sketches, I did it as a quick watercolor/mixed media piece. I really like the dodo fish. I think he may need to meet the pink lizard some time… Ascent of Dodo 2 by ursulav. The evolution of Ascent of Dodo.