Still, being in the same building as a real dodo is closer than most people have gotten in the past 350 years. Unless you’re a credentialed scientist or researcher, the closest you’ll probably be able to get is the replica of the remains on display at the Ashmolean. The remains are typically only available for research for example, scientists conducted DNA tests on the foot several years ago and discovered the dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon. Zoo Atlanta does not have these birds in our care, but we are in luck because the second-closest living relative to the Dodo is the Victoria crowned Pigeon, a species that. In fact, if you asked people to name an extinct animal who wasn’t a dinosaur or woolly mammoth, dodo bird. An extinct flightless bird that inhabited Mauritius, the Dodo was about one metre tall and may have weighed 1018 kg. The Dodo bird was a whopping three-foot-tall pigeon DNA sequencing in 2002 lead to genetic evidence that the Dodo’s closest living relative was the Nicobar pigeon. The rest of the body was burned, lost forever to the annals of history. The word dodo is synonymous with extinct animals. By 1755, the museum discovered that mites and other bugs had destroyed everything but the dodo’s head and one foot. With no known predators, the dodo gradually became bigger in size and lost its ability to fly. Most of the dodo’s unusual characteristics can be attributed to its isolation. Sadly, the taxidermied dodo was neglected. This bird probably stood some 3 feet tall and weighed up to 50 pounds. When Tradescant passed away in 1662, his collection went to his friend Elias Ashmole, who relocated it to the now-famous Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. When she died, she was stuffed and given to John Tradescant Sr., a naturalist who collected interesting specimens. It’s believed the mummified head came from a dodo once displayed in London as a public attraction. And that’s because the Oxford University Museum of Natural History has the world’s only soft-tissue dodo specimen in existence.įrisbii via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 In fact, some of the earliest images of the dodo, dating back to 1598, show a much thinner, almost athletic bird.ĭespite all of the misleading information out there, there is one thing about dodos we’re certain we know: what its head looked like. Today, some researchers believe the traditional depiction of the dodo may have been a product of artistic license, because its skeleton couldn’t have supported such weight. To add insult to injury, our depiction of dodos as strange, awkwardly-shaped birds may not even accurate-the skeletons in most museums are made of bones scavenged from different birds, so it’s difficult to know how close we get with our modern-day representations.īecause the dodo was extinct before cameras were invented, we can only rely on paintings and illustrations to help inform our current understanding of the flightless bird. The last dodo sighting was reported in 1662, and in 1680, the bird was declared officially extinct.
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