Mauritius lost its giant flightless pigeon within a century of discovery
The dodo Raphus cucullatus lived only on Mauritius before extinction by the late seventeenth century. Dutch sailors recorded it in 1598; hunting, invasive species, and habitat loss followed. Subfossil bones and a dried Oxford head now anchor its place among columbid pigeons.
Subfossil bones suggest the dodo stood roughly 62.6 to 75 centimetres tall and weighed perhaps 10.6 to 17.5 kilograms in the wild. Its living appearance survives only in seventeenth-century drawings, paintings and descriptions that disagree with one another, and only some were made from live birds, so its looks and habits remain uncertain. Artists usually gave it brownish-grey feathers, yellow feet, a tuft of tail plumes, a bare grey head and a beak of black, yellow and green. It swallowed stones to grind its food, probably fruit, lived mostly in the drier coastal woods, and reportedly laid one egg at a time.
Dutch sailors first wrote about it in 1598. Vice admiral Wybrand van Warwijck's crew called it Walghvoghel, roughly tasteless bird, and preferred the plentiful pigeons and parrots, while in 1602 men from the Gelderland named it Dronte, meaning swollen. Sailors and introduced animals hunted it as its habitat was cleared, and the last widely accepted sighting came in 1662. Nobody noticed its passing at first, and some came to think it had never existed; its loss within a century of discovery helped awaken the idea that people could wipe out whole species.
Early naturalists guessed wildly, filing it with vultures, albatrosses, rails or even ostriches. In 1842 the Danish zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhardt proposed it was a ground pigeon, an idea mocked until Hugh Strickland and Alexander Melville's 1848 monograph, based on dissecting the Oxford head and foot, backed him: the short horny beak tip, bare skin around the eyes, low-set nostril and leg scales all matched pigeons. That dried Oxford head is the only soft tissue left, though a great deal of subfossil bone has since come out of the Mare aux Songes swamp.
Beth Shapiro's 2002 DNA study, using the Oxford bird and a Rodrigues solitaire bone, confirmed both as pigeons, with the Nicobar pigeon as their closest living relative, followed by New Guinea's crowned pigeons and Samoa's tooth-billed pigeon; the degraded samples still await independent confirmation. The two lineages split about 23 million years ago, yet the volcanic Mascarenes are under 10 million years old, so the ancestors kept flying long afterward, probably hopping between islands from South Asia. In 2024 the subtribe Raphina was created for the dodo and solitaire alone.
Source: Dodo
