Dodo

• GeneralA giant flightless pigeon; it disappeared around 1680, through hunting and the animals the ships brought.
• It is a pigeon: DNA analysis confirmed that its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon of South-East Asia, and that its ancestors flew to Mauritius before losing the power of flight.
• It was killed not by hunting but by the animals that came with the ships: pigs and macaques ate the eggs and chicks of a bird that laid a single egg a year straight onto the ground.
• No complete specimen survives: the last stuffed specimen in the world was partly burnt at Oxford in 1755, and only a head and a foot of that animal remain.
• The image of the fat, clumsy dodo is largely an invention. A mass estimate based on the length of the femur, tibia and tarsometatarsus gives around 10.2 kg, considerably less than earlier estimates (10.6-21.1 kg) and a long way from the 50 pounds claimed by a seventeenth-century witness: it weighed about as much as a large wild turkey. The histology of its bones also indicates that it bred around August and laid a single egg on the ground, a reproductive rate far too slow to offset predation by the animals the Europeans brought with them.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)

Habitat and environment

Dry coastal and lowland forest of the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean

Size at birth

The chicks grew fast, which let them reach a robust size before the southern summer and the cyclone season

Litter / clutch size

1 egg

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Raphus cucullatus