The Big Dinosaur Podcast

Episode 383 is all about Raphus, a secondarily flightless dinosaur which is often thought of as clumsy, but was actually swift-footed.

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In this episode, we discuss:

News:

• An analysis of dinosaur bone density showed that Spinosaurus & Baryonyx likely hunted underwater source
• Researchers have found Borogovia is a valid taxon and supported it being classified as a troodontid source
• A new enantiornithine, Musivavis amabilis, was described from Liaoning, China source
• Brevirostruavis macrohyoidus was described with a “hyper-elongated tongue” possibly used like a hummingbird or woodpecker source
• Another bird like dinosaur, Kaririavis mater, was found in Brazil with feathers preserved on its foot source
• A review of over 100 specimens resulted in two new dinosaurs being named Meemannavis & Brevidentavis source
• Stan the T. rex was tracked down to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates source
• Stan will be a part of the upcoming Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi which is scheduled to open at the end of 2025 source
• In Beijing, there’s a Birds and Dinosaurs exhibit at the Geological Museum of China source

The dinosaur of the day: Raphus

• Raphus cucullatus, otherwise known as the dodo, request from Tyrant King via patreon/discord
• April Fool’s episode, it is technically a dinosaur!
• Large, flightless bird with downy grey feathers and a white plume tail (probably, but will get to that)
• Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem about a dodo in his Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, from 1896:
• The Dodo used to walk around, And take the sun and air. The sun yet warms his native ground – The Dodo is not there! The voice which used to squawk and squeak Is now for ever dumb – Yet may you see his bones and beak All in the Mu-se-um.
• Went extinct around the late 1600s (more details later)
• About 3 ft (1 m) tall
• Weighed about 23 to 39 lb (10.6 to 17.5 kg), in the wild (may have been rounder in captivity)
• Lots of drawings, paintings, and written accounts from the 1600s, though lots of differences in how the dodo looks (only some of them based on live specimens), so exact appearance unclear, as well as how dodos behaved
• Depicted with brownish-grey feathers, stout, yellow legs, a tuft of curly feathers on the tail, a grey head, and a black, yellow, and green beak
• Had black claws
• Had small wings and a large beak
• Contrary to how it’s been portrayed, was not fat and clumsy
• Dodos have been depicted as fat and clumsy, but that’s probably based on overfed captive dodos or crudely stuffed ones. Also possible it shows dodos with puffed feathers, as part of display behavior
• Other depictions, such as a painting by Ustad Mansur in 1625, rediscovered in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in 1955, shows a dodo with native Indian birds, and the dodo is slimmer and brownish (possibly the most accurate depiction)
• The other birds in the painting are accurate, and this dodo may have lived with other birds in the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s collection (English traveler Peter Mundy said he saw two dodos there sometime between 1628 and 1633)
• Depictions after 1638 seem to be based on earlier images, and there are lots of differences in the details, which makes it hard to know what’s accurate
• Sometimes depicted as white. But the “white dodo” was an erroneous conjecture, based on reports of the Réunion ibis and 17th century paintings of white, dodo-like birds in the 1800s by Pieter Withoos and Pieter Holsteyn
• In 1619, Willem Bontekoe mentioned fat, flightless birds as “Dod-eersen” in his journal, without mentioning their color. The journal was published in 1646, along with an engraving of a dodo that was white and stocky
• In 1987, scientists described a recently extinct species of ibis from Réunion with a relatively short beak. Reassigned it to Threskiornis. These birds are also white and black with slender beaks, which fits the description of the Réunion solitaire
• Weight may have changed depending on the season (fatter in cold seasons, thinner in hot seasons)
• A 2017 histology study of dodo bones and modern Mauritian birds suggested dodos bred around August, after storing up fat, and the chicks grew quickly, reaching near adult sized before summertime in November to February. then adult dodos that had bred would molt around March, and be done by the end of July, ready to breed again
• Dodo has been described as a “strong and greedy” hunter, could be because it was during the season when they were fattening up
• Bigger than a turkey
• Male dodos may have been larger and had longer beaks than female dodos
• Possible males lived to age 21 and females to age 17
• Feathers were like pigeon feathers, pennaceous rather than downy (related to pigeons)
• Had blue-grey plumage
• Had a heavy skull and beak
• Had a more robust skull than a pigeon’s
• Head was wider than it was long
• Head was a lighter grey than the body
• Eye sockets were in the back of the skull
• Had a long, hooked beak
• May have used its beak for defense
• Probably provided crop milk to its young
• Probably had nests on the ground
• May have only laid one egg at a time
• Had four toes, three in the front and one in the back
• All toes had thick, black claws
• Had a large sternum, though it was small proportionately, compared to smaller pigeons that can fly
• Probably was a fast runner
• Had muscle scars on the bones, so wings may have been used for display and balance (not completely useless)
• Probably became flightless because there weren’t really any predators around and there was lots of food
• Etymology for the word dodo is not clear
• First written about in 1598 by Dutch sailors, when they arrived at the island Mauritius
• Portuguese sailors were trying to land on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, but were blown off course from a storm, and ended up on Mauritius
• One of the original names for the dodo was “Walghvoghel” in Dutch (written in a journal in 1598 by Dutch Vice Admiral Wybrand can Warwijck, during the Second Dutch Expedition to Indonesia)
• The name means “tasteless” or “insipid” or “sickly bird”
• From the English translated version of the description: “finding in this place great quantity of foules twice as bigge as swans, which they call Walghstocks or Wallowbirdes being very good meat. But finding an abundance of pigeons & parrots they disdained any more to eat those great foules calling them Wallowbirds, that is to say loathsome or fulsome birdes”
• Also from the voyage, there’s mention that the Portuguese called them penguins (not from the word penguin, because penguins in Portuguese were called “fotilicaios” at the time) but from pinion, to refer to the small wings
• Dodo was also called “Dronte” (means “swollen” in Dutch), “griff-eendt” and “kermisgans”, to refer to fowl fattened for the Kermesse festival in Amsterdam, which happened the day after they arrived at Mauritius
• Could be related to Dodaars, which means “fat-arse” or “knot-arse” and refers to the knot of feathers on the tail
• That word first used in 1602
• Sir Thomas Herbert, an English writer, was the first to use the word dodo in his 1634 travelogue that said the Portuguese used that word, when they visited Mauritius in 1507
• Emmanuel Altham, also used the word dodo in a letter in 1628 and said its origin was Portuguese
• But, it’s not clear if that was the case
• Another suggestion is dodo is sort of an onomatopoeia for the bird’s call (“doo-doo”)
• The name cucullatus, “hooded” was first used in 1635 by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, as Cygnus cucullatus, referring to Carolus Clusius’s 1605 depiction of a dodo
• Carl Linnaeus wrote it was Struthio cucullatus in the 1700s, and Mathurin Jacques Brisson used the term Raphus cucullatus in 1760
• In 1766, Linnaeus used the term Didus ineptus (“inept dodo”) but it’s been synonymized with Raphus cucullatus
• Dutch word “dodoor” means “sluggard”
• Portuguese word “doudo” means “foolish” or “simple”
• Arab vessels visited Mauritius in the Middle Ages and Portuguese ships visited between 1507 and 1513, but neither settled there. No records of dodos from then, though the Portuguese name for Mauritius is “Cerne (swan) island” and may refer to the dodos
• The Dutch acquired Mauritius in 1598
• When the first Dutch sailors made it to the island, they’d been at sea for a while, and were looking for new things to eat. A 1602 journal by Willem Van West-Zanen mentioned 24 to 25 dodos were hunted for food, and they were so large they had to preserve some by salting
• Meat described by some as unsavory (preferred to eat parrots and pigeons) and some said it was tough but good
• Some only wanted to eat the gizzards, considered to be the best part of the dodo for eating
• Most descriptions of dodos were found in ship’s logs and journals of the Dutch East India Company (no scientific descriptions)
• One description from van Warwijck’s 1598 journal, wrote: “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 3 or 4 blackish feathers protrude. The tail consists of a few soft incurved feathers, which are ash coloured. These we used to call ‘Walghvogel’, 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 flavour and easily masticated”
• Travel journal from the Dutch ship Gelderland, from 1601 to 1603 has the only known sketches of living or recently killed dodos. Probably drawn but Joris Joosetensz Laerle and another, unnamed artist. But, unclear how many were drawn based on living dodos and how many were stuffed
• Most descriptions were brief, so not much known about the behavior
• A Dutch letter in 1631 wrote about dodos, referring to them as wealthy mayors: “The mayors are superb and proud. They presented themselves with an unyielding, stern face and wide open mouth, very jaunty and audacious of gait. They did not want to budge before us; their war weapon was the mouth, with which they could bite fiercely. Their food was raw fruit; they were not dressed very well, but were rich and fat, therefore we brought many of them on board, to the contentment of us all.”
• Another description, by Herbert in 1634: “First here only and in Dygarrois [Rodrigues] 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 fifty pound. It is reputed more for wonder than for food, greasie stomackes may seeke after them, but to the delicate they are offensive and of no nourishment. Her visage darts forth melancholy, as sensible of Nature’s injurie in framing so great a body to be guided with complementall wings, so small and impotent, that they serve only to prove her bird. The halfe of her head is naked seeming couered with a fine vaile, her bill is crooked downwards, in midst is the thrill [nostril], from which part to the end tis a light green, mixed with pale yellow tincture; her eyes are small and like to Diamonds, round and rowling; her clothing downy feathers, her train three small plumes, short and inproportionable, her legs suiting her body, her pounces sharpe, her appetite strong and greedy. Stones and iron are digested, which description will better be conceived in her representation”
• Four specimens brought to Europe in the early 1600s, and studied in the 1800s (includes a dried head)
• English writer Sir Hamon L’Estrange wrote about a dodo in London: “About 1638, as I walked London streets, I saw the picture of a strange looking fowle hung out upon a clothe and myselfe with one or two more in company went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turkey cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock fesan, and on the back of a dunn or dearc colour. The keeper called it a Dodo, and in the ende of a chymney in the chamber there lay a heape of large pebble stones, whereof hee gave it many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs, and the keeper told us that she eats them (conducing to digestion), and though I remember not how far the keeper was questioned therein, yet I am confident that afterwards she cast them all again”
• Lots of dodos sent to Europe and Asia, but hard to know how many made it alive to their destinations (Julian Hume suggested at least 11)
• Includes the London specimen Hamon L’Estrange described in 1638, two live specimens seen in Surat, India by Peter Mundy between 1628 and 1634, one sent to Nagasaki, Japan, in 1647
• A potential dodo egg was stored in the East London Museum in South Africa, In 2010, the museum proposed using genetic studies to see if it was a dodo egg. But it may be an ostrich egg
• François Cauche in 1651 wrote: “I have seen in Mauritius birds bigger than a Swan, without feathers on the body, which is covered with a black down; the hinder part is round, the rump adorned with curled feathers as many in number as the bird is years old. In place of wings they have feathers like these last, black and curved, without webs. They have no tongues, the beak is large, curving a little downwards; their legs are long, scaly, with only three toes on each foot. It has a cry like a gosling, and is by no means so savoury to eat as the Flamingos and Ducks of which we have just spoken. They only lay one egg which is white, the size of a halfpenny roll, by the side of which they place a white stone the size of a hen’s egg. They lay on grass which they collect, and make their nests in the forests; if one kills the young one, a grey stone is found in the gizzard. We call them Oiseaux de Nazaret. The fat is excellent to give ease to the muscles and nerves”
• Description talks about a bird with three toes and no tongue, which is not a dodo. Some thought it was a new species of dodo, Didus nazarenus. Possible the description was mixed in with a description of a cassowary. Cauche also mentioned a “young ostrich” taken on the ship in 1617, and it’s the only reference to a possible juvenile dodo
• At different times thought to be a small ostrich, a rail, an albatross, a vulture, and a ground pigeon
• Some people doubted the dodo existed until the fossils were found, even though there was a head and foot at Oxford, a foot in London, and skulls in Prague and Copenhagen from dodos that had been caught and shipped alive from the island
• Hugh Strickland wrote The Dodo Book in the 1840s and 1850s, and included accounts and illustrations of the dodo, and depictions of the specimens that made it to Europe. This was the foundation of the monograph The Doto and Its Kindred, published by Strickland and Melville in 1848, where Melville described the remains. They had permission to dissect the dodo head at Oxford and confirmed it was a giant ground pigeon, instead of an ostrich, rail, albatross, or vulture
• Dodo extinction
• Dutch colonized Mauritius in 1644 and brought cats, dogs, pigs, and sometimes monkeys
• Last agreed upon sighting of a dodo was in 1662
• Went extinct within less than a century of being discovered
• Extinction not noticed at first, and its extinction thought to be a myth by some people
• Dodo was not afraid of humans, which made it easy prey for sailors
• Hunted by sailors and invasive species, and habitat was destroyed
• In the 1600s, human population on the island was never more than 50 people, but they introduced dogs, pigs, cats, rats, and crab-eating macaques, which went for dodo nests and the same food resources
• Invasive species and habitat destruction probably contributed more to its extinction than being hunted
• Some fossils found in 2005 of dodos killed by a flash flood
• In 1997, Carlos Yamashita suggested the broad-billed parrot may have needed dodos and Cylindraspis tortoises to eat palm fruits and excrete their seeds, which became the parrots’ food
• Dodo may have been rare before humans came to Mauritius
• But, dodos did survive hundreds of years of volcanic activity and climatic changes
• Some controversy on when dodos became extinct. Last widely accept record of a dodo sighting is 1662, by Volkert Evertsz, who was shipwrecked, and described birds on a small islet off Mauritius, which may have been Amber Island: “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”
• Another sighting was in 1688 by Isaac Johannes Lamotius
• A statistical analysis in 2003 by David Roberts and Andrew Solow estimated dodos went extinct in 1693, and suggested dodos were probably rare by the 1660s (since last sighting before 1662 was 1638)
• In 1868 Alfred Newton suggested the name dodo was transferred to the red rail after the dodo went extinct (some descriptions after 1662 use “dodo” when referring to the red rail
• Dutch manuscripts from 1664 to 1674 also mentioned dodos but may have been talking about red rails. Cheke and Parish in 2020 suggested the dodo disappeared from predation by feral pigs in 1658 to 1664, but people didn’t realize at the time that dodos were extinct, and the settlers hadn’t seen dodos before but expected to see flightless birds, so they accidentally referred to red rails as dodos
• Red rails laid more eggs at a time than dodos, eggs incubated faster, and their nests were probably concealed, so they may have been less vulnerable to the pigs
• So, unclear exactly when dodos went extinct, but were probably extinct by 1700
• People didn’t recognize that dodos were extinct, however, until the 1800s
• Partly for religious reasons, since people didn’t believe in extinction until Georges Cuvier, and partly because many scientists didn’t think dodos ever existed, and thought they were a myth
• Penny Magazine in 1833 used dodos as the first example of human-induced extinction, and dodos have been seen as a icon of extinction since
• Hard to know when exactly it went extinct, since there were rare sightings (may have existed for a while unseen)
• Closely related to Raphus solitarius of Réunion island and Pezophaps solitaria of Rodrigues island
• Raphus solitarius and Pezophaps solitaria went extinct in the 1700s
• In 2004 Julian Penderhume and others published on Dutch diaries and the demise of the dodo
• Confirmed that dodo specimens were collected regularly for at least 26 years after 1662 (last agreed upon sighting)
• Calculated new extinction date
• Last accepted sighting of dodos was Volkert Evertszoon, who was shipwrecked in 1662 on an islet with some dodos
• In 1674, Commander Hubert Hugo questioned Simon, a recaptured slave, who had seen two dodos between 1663 and 1674
• Also a note that hunters killed dodo for Hugo in 1673
• Lamotius was in charge of Mauritius after Hugo, from 1677 to 1692 and kept diaries. From 1685 to 1688 he did not get much support and had hunters daily going for food. Reliability of the diaries was questioned, and not included in when dodo’s went extinct. His diaries talk about dodos 12 times as part of the hunters’ quarry between 1685 to 1688
• Lamotius last wrote about capturing a dodo on November 25, 1688
• Lamotius used the term dodaersen, which researchers thought was a name transferred from the dodo to the red rail (Aphanapteryx bonasia), which had a smaller, more slender beak
• Penderhume and others found it more likely Lamotius was referring to the dodo. “He was a credible observer, having been instructed by the Dutch East India Company to record, among other things, the natural history of Mauritius” and he “would have been well acquainted with the distinctive morphology of the dodo because of its fame in western Europe—at least three specimens had been transported to the Netherlands and many paintings were in existence, predominantly by Dutch artists.”
• Dutch were also familiar with rails and rail-like birds, and neither Hugo nor Lamotius refer to them, but earlier Dutch accounts refer to the red rails of Mauritius as field chickens. Found no evidence that Lamotius or Hugo changed the name to dodaersen
• Estimated the dodo went extinct in 1693, based on records of dodo observations (with a 90% confidence interval)
• Lamotius stopped recording hunts in 1688 because it’s believed he became despondent. There’s a diary for 1689 that hasn’t been found, and Lamotius was arrested and left the island in 1692
• The French took over Mauritius in 1710, so it’s possible the dodo became extinct when the French were in charge
• Dodo bones
• Only four incomplete dodo specimens were known until 1860
• First dodo bones found in 1860 by Philip Ayres, who sent them to Richard Owen. Owen seems to have mixed them up with some Rodrigues solitaire Pexophaps solitaria bones, sent around the same time as Louis Bouton, and didn’t follow up
• Then in 1863 Owen sent word to Vincent Ryan, Anglican bishop of Mauritius to spread the word he was looking for dodo fossils. Word got to George Clark, a natural historian and master of a diocesan school in Mauritius, who had spent more than 30 years looking for dodo fossils without success
• Clark got a lead from his school pupils, who saw tortoise bones being taken out of the marsh, and got exclusive permission to dig at the site of an estate. “The men waded into the deeper, central parts of the marsh, feeling for bones using their hands and feet, and the first discoveries were made”
• Harry Higginson, a civil engineer, was in Mauritius to help construct a new railway. In September 1865, he noticed some bird bones that workers were removing from the soil. He took some of the bones to Clarke, who had Owen’s book on the dodo (not true though, since Owen didn’t publish the book until a year later, in 1866). They compared and found the bones to be dodo bones
• Higginson claimed he was first to find the dodo bones, but there’s evidence Clark got there first and Higginson misremembered the date he visited Clark (his notes were written after the fact and didn’t mention the date he was walking and found the bones). But it happened shortly before the completion of the railway, which opened October 19, 1865, and Clark’s first letter to Owen is dated October 6, 1865
• In 1865, George Clark, found more than 300 dodo specimens in a swamp (but not many skull and wing bones, probably washed away or were scavenged)
• Led to more interest about the dodo
• Owen publicly announced the discovery, and had lots of lectures and public engagements before he published the description of the fossils
• Clark was paid £100 for 100 bones from the British Museum
• Richard Owen and Alfred Newton both wanted to describe the dodo skeletons. Ended up in a rivalry
• Alfred Newton became the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Cambridge
• Edward Newton, Alfred Newton’s brother, was posted to Mauritius from 1859 to 1877 as a colonial administrator, and eventually became Colonial Secretary
• Edward Newton was interested in the study of birds, so he sent specimens to his brother from Mauritius
• Alfred asked his brother about dodo bones
• In 2009, J.P. Hume and others wrote about how Owen “stole” the dodo
• Before the Suez Canal opened in 1869, letters to and from Mauritius took six to seven weeks to arrive (so timeline is a bit confusing)
• First fossils of dodos found in the Mare aux Songes marsh in Mauritius in 1865, started a race to publish about the skeleton
• At the time of the dodo discoveries, there was a malaria epidemic from 1865 to 1868 that killed 48,000 people, over 13% of the population, in Mauritius (so there wasn’t much initial interest on Mauritius about the discovery)
• George Clark sent bones to Richard Owen and Alfred Newton
• Owen intercepted fossils meant for Alfred, and published on the dodo first
• Clark mostly found larger bones (since they were extracting them from the marsh with their hands and feet)
• Edward Newton saw Clark as mostly doing it for the money, though he also wanted to make money
• Higginson and Clark also had a rivalry, and Clark implied to Owen that Higginson paid people to go at night and remove bones without authorization (Higginson donated specimens to three museums)
• More marshes searched for dodo bones (since Clark had exclusive rights), but none found
• Edward sent bones to Alfred November 1865, also seems to have sent Owen bones and asked for any surplus bones to go to his brother Alfred
• Clark also sent bones to Alfred via Mylius, a captain
• Owen kept all the bones
• He approached Captain Mylius after the material arrived in London. Clark didn’t know
• On December 12, 1865 Alfred read a letter from Clark at the Zoological Society that announced the dodo discovery and said they would also be available at auction. This seemed to spur Owen to action
• Owen wrote a testimonial for Newton to become the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge in 1865, and congratulated Alfred on his application
• Meanwhile, he also wrote about why he should be the only one to get the dodo bones: “As soon as the Mauritian bones sent to me by Mr Clark arrive I will let you know, & you can see them at your leisure; Mr C. & the bishop will, I think, expect me to describe them & give the Discoverer credit for his painstaking: you will understand their feeling possibly some disappointment were I to make these treasures over to another, as I gladly would do to you, being over-full of work. In prospect of this little additional ‘straw’ I wrote for the copy of your last labour of Didus.”
• Alfred meanwhile, didn’t know what Owen was doing and followed George Clark’s requests, and scheduled the dodo bones to be sold at auction in January 1866
• Then in December 1865 he got a letter from Mylius, with news that Mylius and Clark had agreed Owen would get all the bones
• Newton couldn’t do much, since Owen had a lot of sway in his professorship application
• His brother Edward wrote: “I must say that I feel very indignant about the conduct of Owen in the case of Clark’s Dodos. He has shown himself to be a very mean minded illiberal sort, and I am very much vexed that I [sic, ? = he] should have been the cause of so much annoyance to you…and I greatly fear that Owen may injure you for the professorship in a vindictive manner.”
• Alfred also had to withdraw his manuscript on the dodo that he’d submitted (so Owen could publish his monograph)
• Clark was also surprised but careful, probably because he didn’t want to lose out on more financial deals (but he didn’t find any more dodo bones, especially after Gaston died and the new owner no longer let him look for bones)
• “I feel very greatful [sic] to him (i.e. you) for the kind interest he expresses in my affairs, & still more for the quiet and gentlemanly way in which he put up with what would be to a person in any wise touchy, a cause of much vexation. I fancy, this is strictly confidential, that Prof. Owen must have expressed some little feeling of jealousy at not having all the bones submitted to him…I need say no more on this disagreeable topic. From yourself and your brother I have met with the most gentlemanly and candid behaviour, for which I shall ever feel grateful…Clark, I think, is evidently afraid of Owen, and though he feels that you have been shabbily treated, yet he thinks that perhaps Mylius was right in handing them [the bones] all over to Owen.”
• Alfred Newton and Richard Owen bickered for five years after
• Owen described the bones in 1866 but based the reconstruction on a painting by Savery that made them too squat and obese (the way the dodo is still often depicted). He corrected it in 1869 after he got more bones, and made the dodo more upright
• Louis Etienne Thirioux, an amateur naturalist and barber, found two dodo specimens around 1900 in a few locations, which included the first articulated specimen, and the only remains of a juvenile specimen (now a lost tarsometatarsus)
• Thirioux’s specimens were scanned and studied in 2016
• In 2015, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology published an atlas on the dodo, based on two-near complete dodo skeletons (and five years of work)
• Looked at the Thirioux skeletons and described new bones like knee caps, ankle, and wrist bones
• Skeleton at the Mauritius Institute is the only known complete dodo skeleton, and the only one with bones from one individual
• Second specimen is at the Durban Natural Science Museum, and is nearly complete but is probably a composite of at least two individuals
• In 2005, at least 17 more dodos found in various stages of maturity (no juveniles though), from dodos trying to get to water during a severe drought, around 4,200 years ago, in a swamp
• In 2006, a complete dodo skeleton was found in a lava cave
• Dodo relatives
• In 2014, Tim Heupink and others published on the relationship between the spotted green pigeon and the dodo
• The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) and Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria) are part of the subfamily Raphinae (very diverse pigeon species)
• Genetic analysis found the Nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica, from southeast Asia) is their closest living relative
• The spotted green pigeon (Caloenas maculata) was described in 1783 and is similar to the Nicobar pigeon
• But for a while, the spotted green pigeon was thought to be an abnormal form of the Nicobar pigeon
• The ancestor of these birds was probably able to fly but was semi-terrestrial and partial to islands. May be a stepping stone hypothesis, where the ancestor of the dodo “travelled from island to island, starting somewhere in Southeast Asia or India and finishing in Mauritius and Rodrigues [16, 17], the mentioned traits suggest that flight rather than any other form of transport was a primary contributor to this dispersal. As a result the unexpected addition of another member to the morphologically diverse extended Dodo clade supports the idea of the stepping stone hypothesis and contributes to our understanding of how the Dodo came to be such a remarkable example of distant isolation and subsequent morphological evolution.”
• Dodo diet and habitat
• Lived on Mauritius, an island nation east of Madagascar
• Mauritius is an island about 500 mi east of Madagascar
• Lived in the woods in drier coastal areas
• Mauritius island had a volcanic origin and is less than 10 million years old
• Not really any mammalian herbivores on the island, so adult dodos didn’t really have any natural predators
• Some fossils also found in caves in highland areas, that were once mountains
• May have eaten fruit
• May have also eaten nuts, seeds, bulbs, and roots, as well as crabs and shellfish
• Used gizzard stones to help digest food
• Could eat lots of things, since it probably ate a lot of different foods on the long sea journeys
• Diet probably changed depending on the season
• Other, now extinct, birds that lived alongside the dodo include the flightless red rail, the broad-billed parrot, the Mascarene grey parakeet, the Mauritius blue pigeon, the Mauritius owl, the Mascarene coot, the Mauritian shelduck, the Mauritian duck, and the Mauritius night heron
• Other, now extinct, animals that lived alongside the dodo include the saddle-backed Mauritius giant tortoise, the domed Mauritius giant tortoise, the Mauritian giant skink, and the Round Island burrowing boa
• Dodo brain and histology
• A 2016 study by Maria Eugenia Leone Gold and others CT the skulls of dodos and eight close relatives and built virtual brain endocasts
• Found the dodo had a normal sized brain for its body size, and the brain to body size ratio was similar to modern pigeons
• Probably was similar in intelligence to pigeons
• Had a large olfactory bulb (good sense of smell)
• In 2017, D. Angst and others published on the bone histology of the dodo
• Found different stages of growth and maturity, and the youngest ones were late stage juveniles
• Had rapid growth rates until it reached sexual maturity
• Medullary bone found in two specimens
• Histology is similar to modern birds
• Histological evidence of molting shows after summer, adults that had just bred molted
• Proposed the dodo bred around August and chicks grew quickly before summer in the southern hemisphere, or cyclone season

Fun Fact: The way dodos have been depicted has changed since their discovery in 1600; unfortunately for the dodo, many of the more recent depictions show them as slower and more dimwitted they actually were.

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