I've been fascinated by the Dodo ever since I was a child. As a kid I knew dinosaurs and wooly mammoths were extinct because they lived so very very long ago. But the idea of dodos living so close to our current timeline that there were still pieces of them in museums astounded me. Of course now I know in modern times we've just been killing off animals left and right, but I was oblivious to this at the age of 7 and only dinosaurs and the dodo were never coming back. Here is a
list (with pictures) of extinctions in the last 100 years.
There's been a lot in the news lately about losing our rhinos, and there's a horribly depressing display about extinct species of tigers at my local zoo, Makes me sad inside. The extinction the planet would benefit the most from would be the extinction of people. We've made a damn mess of things.
Okay, so the Dodo!
The dodo was already a small population, residing only on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, near Madagascar. It's a related to pigeon. It's closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon. It was big--about 3 feet tall, and weighed between 20 and 50 lbs. It could not fly.
It was first discovered by the Western world in 1598 by Dutch sailors. By 1662 it was dead...as a dodo. We managed to wipe out an entire species of bird in SIXTY-FOUR years. For a while people thought it was a myth and had never existed at all. It was mostly hunted for its meat and killed off by animals introduced onto the island by Western sailors. Assholes.
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| Which dodo is real? We'll never know because they're DEAD. |
We don't actually know exactly what the dodo looked like. Artists' renditions vary widely and no one is sure how many of them were actually based off of living birds. I think we can safely go with 'weird-ass chicken.' When I was a kid I imagined there were stuffed dodos still tucked into closets in museums in Europe, but this is not the case. There hasn't been a stuffed dodo on display for centuries.
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| This is all that's left. |
By the 19th century (when people started to realize how fucked up we are) the only soft-tissue remains of the dodo was a head from an old stuffed museum dodo (taken off display in roughly 1755) and foot. We still have the head, which is kept under lock and key (I'm assuming) at Oxford University. The foot went missing around 100 years ago.
No stuffed dodos left. Not even a feather. We have a few random bones from the specimens brought back to Europe while the dodo was still alive, but most of our dodo remains are subfossils (almost but not quite a fossil) excavated from a swamp in southern Mauritius. It was excavated in the 1860's and in 2005. The most complete skeleton collected in modern times was found in 1904.
The dodo lives on in human mythology thanks to a few fictional portrayals (
Alice in Wonderland and of course the fantastically bizarre 1938 Warner Brothers cartoon 'Porky in Wackyland' being the most famous). It also stands as a mascot for all animals murdered to extinction by careless humans.
The dodo. Never forget.
Further Reading:
