Transcription
Perhaps the most iconic extinct species in existence, the dodo is still a species shrouded in mystery. It was first recorded in 1598 by Dutch sailors, and within less than a century of being found, it was gone.
To add to the mystery, over the years it was known about, human interaction with the dodo was extremely limited. In fact, by the time the Dutch actually settled on the island of Mauritius, where the dodos lived, they were only seen three more times.
In this video, we're taking a look at the dodo and exploring five of the mysteries surrounding this strange bird: What did it actually look like? How did it get the name "dodo"? What caused its extinction? What type of bird was it? And is there any truth behind the fabled white dodos of the nearby island of Réunion?
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Before we take a look at the mysteries around the dodo, we need a bit of background. The dodo lived on a small island about 800 km off the east coast of Africa. Today, it's known as Mauritius. It's part of an island chain called the Mascarenes, and one of three main islands that make up the archipelago.
The first record of the islands was made in the year 975, when Arab sailors passed passing by drew this map. They gave each island a name, with Mauritius being called Dina Arobi, meaning "desert island." But the island is anything but a desert. All three of the islands were host to an amazing and unique set of species, but Mauritius was the most diverse of the three, with 273 species of endemic plant, two endemic species of giant tortoise, and 28 endemic species of bird. The islands were never colonized by any terrestrial mammals other than bats, so every major niche was filled by reptiles and birds. This meant that the tortoises were huge, and some of the birds were too, thanks to a phenomenon called island gigantism. The other two islands of Réunion and Rodrigues were also rich in plant and bird life, each having one or two species of giant tortoise and a large endemic flightless or nearly flightless bird.
After the Arab sailors made note of the islands, they weren't recorded again for over 500 years. In 1507, the Portuguese came across them again. As they weren't on any European map at the time, they thought they were the first to find them. They named the island chain the Mascarenes but weren't interested in settling there, so they put them on the map and moved on.
Finally, in 1598, the Dutch went ashore and began recording the wildlife on the islands. As they recorded what they found, they also regularly killed and ate it. They brought animals, crops, and pests along with them. This arrival eventually spelled the end for many of the endemic species on the islands, including the [Music] dodo.
When someone mentions the dodo, most of us have a clear picture picture in our minds of what the bird looked like. It holds a place in popular culture unlike almost any other extinct species. We've read about them in books and seen them in childhood cartoons. We use expressions like "going the way of the dodo" for something that's becoming obsolete or "dumb as a dodo" for someone who's lacking intellectual prowess. There's even an incredibly popular YouTube channel called The Dodo that focuses on the care of animal well-being.
Most of what we know about the dodo is based on subfossils found on Mauritius. Over the years, from the skeletal structure of the birds, we know that they stood as much as 75 cm tall and weighed as much as 18 kg. No full specimen exists today. In fact, other than the subfossils, we only have a single dried head, a foot that's mostly bone, a skull, and an upper jaw. There was one once, a full dried foot that accompanied the dried head, but sadly, it was lost. Thankfully, in the mid-19th century, a cast was made of this foot, along with the head. The casts of the dried dodo head and foot can be found in museums around the world.
No feathers remain, so their appearance can be hard to determine. There are countless images of the birds, yet most of them are a lie. Okay, not quite a lie, but certainly unreliable. The dodos were first recorded by the Dutch in 1598 when they landed on Mauritius, but between that moment and when they actually settled there 40 years later, they still only used the island as a stopover for food. The majority of the people who saw the dodo alive were sailors with little to no interest in the biological significance of the island.
When sailors wrote about the birds, they did so in a non-scientific way, often exaggerating the bird's odd characteristics. But a couple of written accounts stand out. One of the first records of the species was made by Dutch Vice Admiral Wybrand van Warwijck, who wrote the following after landing on Mauritius in 1598: "Blue parrots are very numerous there, as well as other birds, among which are a kind conspicuous for their size, larger than our swans, with huge heads only half covered with skin, as if clothed with a hood. These birds lack wings; in the place of which three or four blackish feathers protrude. The tail consists of a few soft incurved feathers, which are ash-colored. These we used to call Valk Vogel for the reason that the longer and oftener they were cooked, the less soft and more insipid eating they became. Nevertheless, their belly and breast were of a pleasant flavor and easily masticated." Naturally, his account is interested in describing the bird and explaining what it was like to eat it. This would help future sailors make a more informed decision for what animal would be on the menu when they stopped by.
Another description of a wild dodo on the island is one of the last records of the birds being cited in 1634. The English writer Sir Thomas Herbert made this description in his work, "Some Years Travels into Africa and Asia the Great": "First here only and in Digoy is generated the Dodo, which for shape and rareness may antagonize the Phoenix of Arabia. Her body is round and fat; few weigh less than 50 pound. It is reputed more for wonder than for food; greasy stomachs may seek after them, but to the delicate they are offensive and of no nourishment. Her visage darts forth melancholy, as sensible of Nature's injury in framing so great a body to be guided with complemental wings so small and impotent that they serve only to prove her bird. The half of her head is naked, seeming covered with a fine veil. Her bill is crooked downwards; in midst is the thrill, from which part to the end is a light green mixed with pale yellow tincture. Her eyes are small and like to diamonds, round and rolling. Her clothing downy feathers; her train three small plumes, short and in proportion. Her legs suiting her body; her pounce is sharp; her appetite's strong and greedy."
Once again, we have a focus on how the bird tastes, and somehow Herbert almost seems to have a disdain for the dodo entirely, reflecting a rather exaggerated negative summary of its features. Nonetheless, we only have a few written accounts to work from, and this is one of the better ones.
Dodos didn't stay on Mauritius. As Europeans sailed around the world, they often collected interesting local wildlife to bring home and sell to nobles and estate owners who prided themselves in their collections of exotic animals. The dodo was no exception, and several birds managed to make it to Europe alive. This is where the majority of the depictions of dodos come from. While this may seem like a reliable source for biological depictions, it probably wasn't.
The captive birds were often overfed, causing them to be much heavier and more slouched over than they likely were in the wild. On top of this, the majority of the depictions of the dodo that we have aren't from dodos that survived in captivity in Europe, but rather birds that died on their way to captivity and were subsequently poorly taxidermied. Without an understanding of how the birds moved and stood while alive, taxidermists could only guess at what they would have looked like. This would have led artists to create distorted depictions of these poorly taxidermied specimens, and once one or two drawings or paintings were made, future depictions were all just iterations of the previous ones. In fact, the majority of the paintings and drawings of dodos made through the centuries were by people who never saw the bird, neither dead nor alive. They simply copied other paintings and drawings.
The painting that was used as the standard for the species was one by Dutch artist Roland Savery from 1626. It shows a rather fat dodo sitting amongst some exotic birds and animals. He likely never saw a living dodo and created this work by reading descriptions, looking at other drawings of the bird, and possibly viewing a taxidermy specimen, as several were known to exist in European collections at the time. It most likely isn't accurate.
Over the next 200 years, the bird slipped into the realm of myth. Because so few specimens existed and almost no one had ever cited one, people assumed that they couldn't be real, and if it wasn't real, why should anyone care about creating realistic depictions of it? It wasn't until the mid-19th century that public perception changed. In 1833, Penny Magazine in the UK published a story about the dodo, using it as an example of human-induced extinction. Shortly thereafter, the dodo was scientifically recognized and declared extinct.
About 30 years later, Lewis Carroll published "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," and the dodo's inclusion in the book catapulted it to become an icon of extinction. But the problem was that we still didn't really know what it looked like. It was unknown if any of the surviving sketches or paintings had been made from living animals on the island of Mauritius, which scientists would have considered credible and faithful to life.
Around the time that "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was being published, an important discovery was made. A travel journal from a Dutch ship called the Gelderland surfaced. The journal covered the years 1601 to 1603, and in it were a series of sketches of various extinct birds from Mauritius, including the dodo. These are the only sketches we have of the species that we know were made on the island of living or recently killed birds. They seem to be made by two different people and are considered the most true-to-life sketches of the birds today.
But they still leave us with a problem: What color was the dodo? Their feathers were still unknown, as well as the color of their feet, the skin on their faces, and their beaks. Written descriptions sometimes said the birds were gray, sometimes brown. There were also reports of white dodos on the nearby island of Réunion. The majority of the written descriptions say that the dodo had white tail feathers, yellow legs, and black, yellow, and green beaks, but the exact colors and their placements on the body were still unknown.
In 1958, a man named Alexander Ivanov discovered a painting in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was a Mughal painting by Ustad Mansur that was made around 1625. The painting depicts seven birds that were kept in the menagerie of Emperor Jahangir, who lived in Surat. In the center of the painting is what is now considered the most realistic depiction of a dodo in existence today. The reason we know that it's likely extremely accurate is because the other birds around the dodo are known today and painted faithfully to their natural colors and shapes, adding to the painting's credibility. English traveler Peter Mundy reported to have personally seen two live dodos in the emperor's collection somewhere between 1628 and 1633. Upon its discovery, paleontologist Julian Hume explained that it was considered a necessary courtesy for emissaries visiting Surat and the palace of the Great Mughal Empire to provide a suitable gift for Emperor Jahangir's menagerie. At least two dodos were donated to the collection. In his opinion, this work of art is almost certainly the most accurate and reliable rendition of the dodo that has [Music] [Music] survived.
How the Dutch sailors that first interacted with the birds began to call them "dodos" is unclear. The origin of the word is disputed, with three main theories about how the birds came to acquire the name. The first is that it comes from a Dutch word. Some suggest it comes from the word "dour," which means sluggish. Others suggest it comes from the word "dodaars," which means fat arse, or not arse, apparently referencing the tuft of feathers it had for a tail.
The second theory is that it comes from a Portuguese word, "dodo," which means fool. And English writers regularly made use of this meaning to imply that the birds were dumb. To this day, in English, being called a "dodo" implies that a person is stupid.
The third theory is that the word is simply an onomatopoeia of the sound the bird made, which was described as being a two-note, pigeon-like sound, sounding which came out as "doo-doo." The Dutch initially referred to the bird as "Valk Vogel," which means "inipid bird." An English translation of the initial report of the birds survives today: "On their left hand was a little island which they named Heemskirk Island, and the bay itself they called Warwick Bay. Here they tarried 12 days to refresh themselves, finding in this place great quantity of fowl, six times as big as swans, which they call valsts or wallow birds, being very good meat. But finding an abundance of pigeons and poes, they disdained anymore to eat those great fowls, calling them wallow birds, that is to say, loathsome or fullsome birds."
However it happened, the English name was already being printed by 1628, only 30 years after the dodo was first encountered, and it's stuck. In almost every language today, the species is commonly referred to as some variation of "dodo," without refrigeration.
Boats that undertook long voyages in the 16th century would make note of islands that were rich in wildlife so that they could stop by to eat fresh protein, fruit, and vegetables the next time that they were passing through. Tortoises and sea turtles were especially popular because sailors could take them on their ships to eat later. All five species of Mascarene tortoise were driven to extinction from human hunting and the introduction of non-native animals within only two centuries of their discovery. The birds suffered greatly too. While the dodo was regularly eaten, sailors would eat any bird that they could find on Mauritius. Human hunting played a part in the extinction of many, many species, including seven of the eight species of parrot and multiple species of dove, pigeon, starling, and rail.
The Dutch finally settled on Mauritius in 1638. There was a single sighting of a dodo that year, but the birds seemed to be essentially gone. The next time they were seen was nearly 30 years later, in 1662, when a Dutch ship was wrecked on a small island off the coast of Mauritius, now called Amber Island. One of the mariners wrote this report of an encounter with a strange animal: "These animals, on our coming up to them, stared at us and remained quiet where they stand, not knowing whether they have wings to fly away or legs to run off, and suffering us to approach them as close as we pleased. 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 of a sudden came running as fast as they could to its assistance, and by which they were caught and made prisoners also."
This was considered the last official sighting of the dodo, but more recently, a later sighting, which was initially given little credence, is being reconsidered as a possible final sighting of the bird. In 1674, a man named Simon, who was enslaved by Dutch settlers and living on Mauritius, escaped captivity and hid in the forest. While in hiding, he claimed to come across a dodo. Because of his status as a slave, his account was highly doubted for centuries, but his claim cannot be dismissed so easily, and it's entirely possible that he did, in fact, see one of the last dodos in the wild.
We have many accounts of later sightings of a bird referred to as the dodo on the island of Mauritius, but it's now understood that the name "dodo" had been transferred to the red rail, another flightless, though much smaller, endemic bird to the island.
The main narrative of the dodo's extinction has historically been that sailors ate them all until there were none left. And while they certainly did kill dodos en masse, and it is true that within a few decades of initial contact with humans, they were gone, it doesn't seem to be quite that simple. Mauritius isn't a tiny island, and from the point of human contact to the point of already being gone, no one had settled on the island. Passing sailors clearly preferred to eat other birds, and it isn't likely that enough sailors came through to hunt all the dodos to extinction. Humans certainly played a part in their decline, but researchers noted that hunting didn't seem likely as a sole cause of extinction.
The next natural culprit to investigate are rats, with countless island extinctions being tied to these pests that get onto islands as stowaways on boats. They seemed a plausible cause of extinction on Mauritius too. Dodos only laid a single egg in their nests on the ground. The males and the females took turns incubating. Could the rats have eaten their eggs before they got a chance to hatch? It doesn't seem likely. Dodos were basically fearless as adults, having no predators for millions of years, but their eggs and young were vulnerable. Not only does Mauritius have large species of land crabs, but some evidence suggests that coconut crabs also used to inhabit the islands. The dodos were probably excellent at defending their eggs from crabs and were probably able to keep rats at bay as well.
The most recent research suggests that the real problem for the dodos were some of the other species introduced by the Dutch before they inhabited the islands. While they were still using them as a stopover location for rest and food, they would drop off domestic animals in order to have access to them when they stopped by the next time. Pigs, goats, and macaques were all left to populate the island starting in 1602, and they proved too much for the dodos to keep up with. In particular, the pigs destroyed the dodo's ground nests, while the macaques quickly ate up all the fruit and nuts the dodos relied on. The macaques may even have also directly killed and eaten the dodos and their eggs.
The current theory is that the dodo suffered a wide range of factors that all led to their demise. Deforestation, hunting, and introduced animals made Mauritius unlivable. This combination of human activity ultimately led to them going from abundant to extinct in less than a century.
Dodos were strange-looking birds, unlike any other. Early scientists described it as an ostrich, a rail, an albatross, a vulture, or even a penguin. They had no idea that all of these guesses were wrong, but the odd appearance of the bird meant that much more in-depth study was required to know exactly what it was. Scientific advances in taxonomy in the 19th century meant that someone was finally able to make an educated guess about what type of bird the dodo was.
In 1842, a Danish zoologist named Johannes Theodor Reinhardt took a look at a skull of a dodo held in a museum collection. He came to the conclusion that the dodo must be a type of pigeon, and the scientific community ridiculed him. In their minds, the two looked nothing alike, and the idea of a flightless pigeon was too hard for many to comprehend. Six years after proposing his theory, two English naturalists agreed and published a book called "The Dodo and its Kindred," in which they supported Reinhardt's theory that the dodo was, in fact, a pigeon.
On the next isle over, the Rodrigues solitaire was meeting a similar fate to the dodo. It too was a large, flightless bird and had a lot in common with the dodo. Scientists noticed that the two birds were very similar. They compared the features of both birds to other birds from around the world. A combination of factors helped them to come to the conclusion that the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire were both, in fact, species of flightless pigeon. First were their skulls: they had a short section of keratin on the beak, followed by a large patch of skin that goes around the eye, and their nostrils are placed relatively low on the beaks. This combination of features is only found in some other species of pigeon and dove. And when they examined the skeletal structure of the legs, they noticed that they had the most in common with terrestrial pigeons on other islands in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. Genetic research performed in recent years has confirmed that both birds are most closely related to the Nicobar pigeon, and their next closest relative is the Victoria crowned pigeon, placing them firmly in the Columbidae [Music] family.
In 1611, the first depiction of a white dodo was made. In his painting "Landscape with Orpheus," Roland Savery depicted the dodo as being nearly white, as he wasn't entirely sure what color it should have been. Then, in 1619, a Dutch skipper named Willem Bontekoe, who visited Réunion, mentioned seeing a fat, flightless bird that he called "dodo eenden." "There were also dodo eenden, which have small wings and so far from being able to fly, they were so fat that they could scarcely walk, and when they tried to run, they dragged their underside along the ground." While he didn't mention what color it was, the confusion began. His journal sat unpublished for nearly 30 years. In the meantime, other reports of dodos were coming from Réunion Island. Chief Officer J. Tatton mentioned a white, stocky, and flightless bird that he saw in 1625, and a few others claimed to see it as well.
In 1646, Bontekoe's journal was finally published, and next to the description of his "dodo eenden," the publishers chose to print one of Savery's sketches of a white dodo, as this aligned with the other later reports that they had heard of white dodos living on the island of Réunion. By the 19th century, many believed that the white dodo was a distinct species of either dodo or solitaire found on Réunion Island, and it was given its own scientific name, *Raphus solitarius*. Others believed that it was the same species of dodo, but that it was sexually dimorphic, with males being white and females being gray or brown.
The mystery of the white dodo wasn't solved until 1987, when subfossils found on the island of Réunion in 1974 of an extinct bird were finally examined, and it was described. But it wasn't a pigeon. It seems that the white dodo of Réunion was actually a now-extinct species of white ibis. It had a shorter, less curved beak than other ibis species, giving it an appearance similar to the Rodrigues solitaire. It also had reduced wing bones and ostrich-like feathers towards its rear, both features suggesting that it was at least hesitant to fly and possibly entirely flightless.
When the French took over the island in 1646, they referred to the ibis as a "solitaire." And one description made by Mare of the French East India Company from 1699 still exists today: "I saw a kind of bird in this place which I have not found elsewhere. It is that which the inhabitants call the wazo solitaire, for to be sure it loves solitude and only frequents the most secluded places. One never sees two or more together; it is always alone. It is not unlike a turkey, if it did not have longer legs. The beauty of its plumage is a delight to see; it is of changeable color, which verges upon yellow. The flesh is exquisite; it forms one of the best dishes in this country and might form a dainty at our tables. We wish to keep two of these birds to send to France and present them to His Majesty, but as soon as they were on board ship, they died of melancholy, having refused to eat or drink."
The Réunion ibis was hunted nearly to extinction for its meat. By 1708, in the last few years that it probably managed to survive in remote mountainous regions of the island, it was likely wiped out by feral cats that had been introduced by the French. By only one or two decades after the extinction of the dodo, the Réunion ibis was also gone. And so, in only a century, three iconic flightless birds went extinct in the Mascarenes, along with dozens of other species. Each of their extinctions only has humans to blame. Each of these species lost is also a loss for humanity.
But all might not be lost. With the recent rise of a new kind of science, some extinct species might get a second chance. De-extinction is a means by which recently extinct species can be brought back to life. While we can't bring back every species that has been lost, any species of which we've managed to sequence the entirety of its genome is a candidate. While the Rodrigues solitaire and the Réunion ibis are not on the short list of species to bring back, the dodo is. Colossal Biosciences had already announced plans to bring back the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon, and after receiving a further $150 million in funding, they've added the dodo to their plans as well. For now, the plan is to modify the genome of the Nicobar pigeon, producing birds that look close to a dodo. The science still needs to progress in order to bring back a specimen that is a full match to the species that we lost, but the team is hopeful that in the coming decades, we'll have the chance to see a living, breathing dodo once again.
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