Mauritius Dodo

As the expression to be dead as a dodo rightly points out, the dodo has been wiped away from the surface of the earth. Found solely in Mauritius, the big flightless bird became extinct in the 17th-18th century and relatively few evidence apart from bones suggest its existence. Ancestors of the bird from the pigeon family are thought to have arrived on the island in the past and evolved in a predator free environment with plenty of food which led it to lose its ability to fly. The dodo is used as a concrete example of extinction directly related to human activity and thus used as flash point to prevent the loss of more species.

Measuring about 1m in height and weighing some 20kg, the dodo was a bird grey in colour with a tuft of black feathers for wings, a large hooked bill and thick yellow legs. Since no complete skeleton of the animal has been found, the general structure of the bird can only be guessed at. A replica of the bird can be seen at the National Museum in Port Louis as well as information relating to it and other museums in the world also have stuffed models of the bird to show the example of extinction.

When the Dutch came to the island, they found the bird as innocent and friendly as possible. Since it had evolved in a place with no predator, the birds found no reason to be scared at all and this marked them as stupid to the settlers. They eventually started to hunt down the animals for food though they found the flesh quite unpalatable. Some even salted the flesh to take on voyages and even tried to take the animals to their homes. Since development was beginning at that time in Mauritius, large expanses of the forests were cut down to make way to settlement and ebony was cut down on a large scale for export towards Europe; the dodo thus lost much of its natural habitat. Also, the settlers brought with them alien animals to the island like pigs, monkeys, cats, rats and dogs which predated on the nests and eggs of the birds found on the ground. No single cause can be attributed to the disappearance of the dodo, but rather it is the compounded effect of all these reasons that led to the dodo's eventual extinction.

The last remains of the bird have been found in 2005 at the Mare aux Songes on the highlands of the island where some pristine forests still remain. DNA analysis has revealed that the bird does indeed come from the pigeon family off South East Asia where its cousins are still found like the Nicobar Pigeon off Nicobar Islands and some pigeons off South East Asia. Though dead, the dodo is still of great scientific interest because it represents an animal that successfully adapted to its environment in terms of growing fatter due to the abundance of food it had and also losing its capacity to fly as it gained more weight reflecting evolution in its true form.