The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius until it became extinct in the latter part of the 17th century.
Standing up to a metre in height and weighing around 20 kg, historical accounts describe the dodo as having grey or brown plumage with a tuft of curly feathers on its rump. Its head was bare with grey skin, and its beak was reported to be a mix of green, black, and yellow, while its legs were yellow with black claws.
The dodo inhabited the wooded areas of Mauritius’ drier coastal regions, feeding on nuts, seeds, bulbs, roots, and possibly crabs and shellfish.
Like many birds that evolved in isolation, the dodo had few natural predators and was completely fearless of humans. When Dutch sailors arrived on Mauritius in the 1500s, the bird became easy prey for both humans and introduced species such as dogs, cats, rats, and, particularly, pigs and crab-eating macaques. These animals not only raided the dodo’s nests for eggs but also competed for its food sources.
Humans also contributed to the dodo’s decline by destroying much of its forest habitat. However, as the human population of Mauritius was small, numbering only around 50 individuals, it is likely that the invasive species posed a greater threat to the dodo’s survival than direct human activity.
It is believed that the dodo population was already relatively small before the Dutch arrived. Despite surviving thousands of years of volcanic activity and climate change, a 2005 study uncovered the remains of numerous dodos killed by a flash flood. Due to the bird’s confined range, ecological disasters like this would have had a significant impact on its population.
The last confirmed sighting of a dodo was in 1662, recorded by Dutch sailor Volkert Evertsz, who had been shipwrecked on Amber Island, a small islet off Mauritius.
He reported:
“These animals on our coming up to them stared at us and remained quiet where they stand, not knowing whether they had wings to fly away or legs to run off, and suffering us to approach them as close as we pleased. Amongst these birds were those which in India they call Dod-aersen (being a kind of very big goose); these birds are unable to fly, and instead of wings, they merely have a few small pins, yet they can run very swiftly. We drove them together into one place in such a manner that we could catch them with our hands, and when we held one of them by its leg, and that upon this it made a great noise, the others all on a sudden came running as fast as they could to its assistance, and by which they were caught and made prisoners also.”
In the decades following the dodo’s disappearance, there were several unverified reports of sightings. Isaac Johannes Lamotius, the governor of Mauritius from 1677 to 1692, included the dodo in his hunting records from 1662, and an escaped slave named Simon claimed to have seen a dodo as late as 1674. A statistical analysis by a team from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew determined the dodo’s extinction date as 1690, nearly 30 years after its last confirmed sighting.
Dutch manuscripts published between 1664 and 1674 also mentioned the dodo. However, British ornithologist Alfred Newton suggested that the term “dodo” had been applied to the red rail, noting that some descriptions after 1662 referred to both the dodo and “Dodaers”. English traveller John Marshall similarly used the terms “dodo” and “red hen” interchangeably for the red rail. As new settlers had never seen a real dodo, but expected to encounter flightless birds, they likely used the name “dodo” for the red rail instead.
A recent review of 400 years of scientific literature has sought to illuminate the disappearance of the dodo and its closest relative, the Rodrigues solitaire, which became extinct between the 1730s and 1760s. By analysing hundreds of historical accounts of dodo sightings and studying the world’s only surviving soft tissue from the dodo, housed at the Oxford Museum, researchers uncovered numerous misidentifications made in the centuries following the bird’s extinction. The study also revealed that entirely new species, such as the so-called Nazarene dodo, white dodo, and white solitaire, were mistakenly named. However, the research confirmed that none of these creatures ever existed.
The dodo was not officially declared extinct until the 19th century, partly due to religious beliefs, as extinction was not widely accepted at the time, and partly because some scientists even doubted the dodo’s existence, considering it too strange to be real.
The dodo was first used as an example of human-induced extinction in “Penny Magazine” in 1833, and since then, it has become an iconic symbol of extinction.
One reason the dodo is so well known among extinct birds is undoubtedly its name. The etymology of the word, however, is unclear. Some attribute it to the Dutch word dodoor, meaning “sluggard,” but it is more likely derived from Dodaars, which means either “fat-arse” or “knot-arse”, referring to the knot of feathers on the bird’s rear end.
In 1628, Englishman Emmanuel Altham used the term in a letter, suggesting its origin was Portuguese. The name dodar entered English around the same time as dodo, but it fell out of use by the 18th century. While the Portuguese never formally mentioned the bird, some sources still claim that dodo derives from the Portuguese word doudo (now doido), meaning “fool” or “crazy”. Another theory suggests that dodo is an onomatopoeic representation of the bird’s call, resembling a two-note pigeon-like sound, “doo-doo”.
Of all extinct birds, the dodo is probably the most widely recognized with the expression “as dead as a dodo” widely used to mean something that has become obsolete.
When the dodo was first discovered, it was initially thought to be related to a variety of birds, including ostriches, albatrosses, vultures, swans, and rails, likely due to its large size and unusual shape. However, in the 1880s, detailed examination of its bones revealed traits in its legs that were unique to pigeons.
In 2002, DNA analysis was performed on a specimen from the Oxford Museum, confirming that the dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica), a small bird with metallic green and copper plumage and long, elegant plumes trailing from its neck, found on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India. Its next closest relatives are the crowned pigeons of New Guinea.
Despite these connections, the evolutionary link between the dodo and its relatives is distant, as their common ancestor existed more than 40 million years ago.
The dodo was popularized in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which the bird conducts a chaotic Caucus race, a satirical mockery of the political caucus system. The dodo is a caricature of the author whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and who, because of his stammer, would supposedly introduce himself as “Do-do-dodgson”.
The painting above is by Roelant Savery (1576 – buried 25 February 1639) and is one of the most famous images of a dodo. It was painted in 1626 and at one point was owned by the ornithologist George Edwards, who later gave it to the British Museum. Edward’s Dodo, as it is commonly known, is now exhibited in the Natural History Museum and has given rise to the standard depiction of a dodo.
