The Dodo Blog

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.

RNW: The dodo hunters by Marnie Chesterton: An international team of scientists are, as I write this, standing in a swamp in Mauritius, looking for dodo bones. They have gone out to excavate a mass dodo grave, uncovered in November by a team of Dutch scientists, led by geoscientist Dr Kenneth Rijsdijk.

Dodos’ extinction continues to have impacts. In 1973, a scientist suggested that the Mauritian tree, the Calvaria or Tambalacoque, was dying out because it had entrusted its reproductive future with the dodo. Seeds from the tree needed to pass through the gut of the dodo before they would sprout.

The Calvaria, a hardwood species, were able to survive for 300 years without the bird but nearly went the same way as the dodo. An ornithologist came to the rescue with turkeys. Seeds from the last 13 trees were fed turkeys, and were suitably digested to start growing into seedlings. However the science behind this story, like so many stories that surround the dodo, is considered unreliable.

Yes, the same news of other days, but her text is very good there are some interesting additional information, – as you can see above -, images and an audio interview (link at the beginning at the text as Real audio or Windows Media).

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

Bringing the dodo back to life …, an excellent article by By Steve Connor, from The New Zealand Herald, about this new expedition:

Much of what is known about the appearance of the dodo comes from contemporary drawings and paintings. But these were often inaccurate, subject to the fashions of the time – such as the 17th century predilection for painting over-plump birds.

“The dodo, one of the most documented and famous of birds and a leading contender as the icon of extinction, has endured more than its fair share of overzealous misinterpretation,” said Dr Hume.

In fact, it became so mythologised that some 19th-century scholars began to doubt that it ever existed, believing that the rather poorly preserved specimens were elaborate hoaxes.

In fact all of these specimens were made from the incomplete skeletons of many different individuals. Trying to guess what the real dodo looked like was an uphill struggle.

One problem was its weight. Many of the early paintings depict it as an overweight, almost obese creature that could barely support itself. But, at least one illustration dating from the first Dutch exploration depicts the dodo as a rather slim, even nimble bird.

In reality, it is possible that the dodo was both fat and slim. In other words it may have been adapted to putting on weight quickly in times of plenty – during the wet season, for instance, when there was lots of ripe fruit to eat – which would have allowed it to survive the leaner times of the dry season.

Dodos kept in captivity could just have been overfed, which is why they tended to look much fatter than other birds of a similar shape and size.

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.

From the ABC News Online Scientists on the hunt for how dodo died.:

Scientists in Mauritius have launched a project to discover why the giant dodo bird became extinct.

Most theories blame settlers who found the plump flightless bird on the Indian Ocean island in the 16th century and began to hunt it relentlessly.

In an attempt to provide a scientific answer, the Dodo Research Program plans to study fossils from a mass dodo grave unearthed in southern Mauritius last October and an adjacent site, using carbon dating techniques and DNA analysis.