Birds · Columbiformes · Columbidae

Dodo

Raphus cucullatus

Extinct

No living individual remains anywhere in the world. See full glossary

The dodo was a giant flightless pigeon endemic to Mauritius, more than a metre tall and with an enormous hooked bill. Having evolved on an island without land predators, it lost the ability to fly and all fear. The Portuguese and Dutch sailors who arrived from 1598 onwards hunted it, and above all introduced pigs, monkeys, rats and cats that destroyed its ground nests. In less than a century it was gone, and it is today the universal symbol of human-caused extinction.

Weight

10 kg – 18 kg

Size

70 cm – 1 m

Diet

Herbivore

Feeds mainly on plants.

Activity

Diurnal

Active mainly during the day.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Impossible (extinct)

Temperate forestIslandsHerbivore Diurnal Solitary Bird Temperate forest Islands

1countries11same family

Fun facts

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.

Life cycle & biology

Skeleton type: Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)
Habitat & 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: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphus_cucullatus