Full dodo skeleton found
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, December 24, 2005
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Scientists said they likely have found a complete skeleton of the long-extinct dodo bird.
The dodo was native to Mauritius when no humans lived there, but its numbers rapidly dwindled after the arrival of Portuguese and Dutch sailors in the 1500s. The last recorded sighting of a live bird was in 1663.
An international team of researchers said they found the bones of the bird on a sugar cane plantation on the island of Mauritius off the east coast of Madagascar, and presented their findings at the National Museum of Natural History in the Dutch city of Leiden on Friday.
No complete skeleton of a single dodo bird had ever been retrieved before. The last known stuffed bird was destroyed in a 1755 fire at a museum in Oxford, England, leaving only partial skeletons and drawings of the bird.
“We have found 700 bones, including bones from 20 dodo birds and chicks, but we believe there are many more at the site,” said Kenneth Rijsdijk, a Dutch geologist from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research who led the dig.
The dodo’s name comes from a Portuguese word for “fool,” so named because the bird showed no fear of humans and couldn’t fly, making it easy prey for colonists. The Dutch called it the Walgvogel, or “nasty bird” because it tasted so bad.
Modern scientists see the dodo in a more favorable light. They believe the bird did not fear humans because it had no natural predators on Mauritius and had lost the ability to fly because it was so large. Adults grew to 3 feet tall and weighed about 50 pounds.
The dodo was made famous by a political satire in the book “Alice in Wonderland,” in which a dodo leads a caucus race in which the rules are hazy, contestants run in circles and everybody wins a prize.
