50 Fun Facts About Dodo

The dodo's home island of Mauritius lies in which body of water?

The Indian Ocean. Arab and Portuguese sailors reached the island, some 800 km east of Madagascar, long before 1598, yet none of them left a word about its strangest bird.

Which US biotech firm, already trying to revive the woolly mammoth, announced a plan in 2023 to bring back the dodo?

Colossal Biosciences. Its plan is to edit cells from a living relative of the dodo towards the lost bird's traits and hatch the chicks from surrogate chickens.

What is the dodo's closest living relative?

The Nicobar pigeon. DNA taken from the Oxford specimen in 2002 put the dodo beside this island-hopping bird of Southeast Asia, a clue to how its flying ancestors reached Mauritius.

The dodo's closest relative of all, also extinct and flightless, was which bird?

The Rodrigues solitaire. Unlike the dodo it had large bony knobs on its wings, which rivals swung at each other in fights over territory.

A Dutch account of the 1598 voyage called the dodo twice as big as which bird?

A swan. Four years later another captain wrote that his crew caught the birds to eat and took a number on board for salting.

What did the dodo swallow to help digest its food?

Gizzard stones. A keeper showing off a live dodo around 1638 fed it pebbles 'as big as nutmegs' in front of visitors, saying they helped it digest.

Where is the dodo thought to have nested?

On the ground. The one surviving description, itself doubted, has it laying a single white egg on gathered grass in the forest, easy pickings once the sailors' animals ran wild.

Why is the dodo presumed to have become flightless?

Abundant food and no predators. No mammals competed for the fallen fruit or hunted the birds, so over many generations their bodies grew and their wings shrank.

Which naturalist made the dodo the symbol of the wildlife trust and zoo he founded on the island of Jersey?

Gerald Durrell. He founded the trust in 1963 to save species from extinction, and took as its emblem the best-known bird that nobody saved.

The last widely accepted dodo sighting, in 1662, came from a survivor of what?

A shipwreck. Volkert Evertsz and fellow castaways from the Arnhem wandered Mauritius until they waded out to an islet, where they found dodos and caught them by hand.

Of the last stuffed dodo, kept at Oxford, only the head and which other part were saved?

A foot. Both come from a bird first listed in a private museum's catalogue in 1656, and the skin of the head is now the only dodo soft tissue left for DNA research.

Most subfossil dodo bones have come from which site on Mauritius?

The Mare aux Songes swamp. Animals crowding in for water during a long drought about 4,200 years ago became mired there, leaving the bones of more than 300 dodos.

A 2017 study of dodo bones suggested chicks grew fast so as to be sturdy before which yearly hazard on Mauritius?

The cyclone season. Growth marks in the bones suggest the birds bred around August, raised their chicks quickly, and moulted once the summer storms had passed.

Despite its clumsy image, the dodo is now thought to have been able to do what?

Run quite fast. Its bones point to a strong, speedy runner, and a sailor who helped round the birds up in 1662 wrote that they 'can run very swiftly'.

The Dutch name 'Walghvoghel', first used for the dodo in 1598, means what?

Loathsome bird. Walgen means to sicken, and the crew complained that the meat grew tougher and more tasteless the longer it was cooked.

One theory traces the word 'dodo' to the Dutch 'dodaars', which means what?

Fat-arse or knot-arse. The name points to the tuft of feathers on the bird's rump; many dictionaries still give Portuguese doudo, 'fool', and the origin is unsettled.

A 2016 study of the dodo's braincase found an unusually large region devoted to which sense?

Smell. Most birds invest in eyesight, so the enlarged smell centre suggests the dodo sniffed out its food; the same scans showed a brain of normal size for its body, so it was no bird-brain.

In 1758 Linnaeus placed the dodo in the same genus as which other bird?

The ostrich. He filed the bird under Struthio, then in 1766 changed his mind and coined Didus ineptus, 'the inept dodo', a name later dropped under the rules of priority.

The dodo's Latin species name cucullatus means what?

Hooded. Sailors in 1598 wrote that the bird's huge head looked half covered with skin, as if it were wearing a hood, and the Latin name followed in 1635.

Which Dutch painter was the most prolific illustrator of the dodo?

Roelant Savery. He had been court painter to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, whose collection held a dodo, and he kept slipping the bird into the corners of his crowded animal scenes.

A 17th-century painting attributed to Ustad Mansur probably shows a dodo in whose menagerie?

Emperor Jahangir's. The Mughal ruler kept his animals at Surat, where an English traveller saw two live dodos, and the painting shows a slim brown bird, nothing like the fat birds of European art.

How did dodos react when people first walked up to them?

They showed no fear. One sailor wrote that the birds simply stood and stared as his party came up to them, which made a large flightless animal fatally easy to catch.

Hamon L'Estrange saw a live dodo in 1638 in which city?

London. Drawn in by a picture hung outside, he found the bird kept in a room, and his is the only account that proves a dodo reached Europe alive.

Besides Europe, a live dodo was shipped in 1647 as a gift to which distant country?

Japan. Documents published in 2014 showed that the bird reached Nagasaki alive, which makes it the last dodo ever recorded in captivity.

Which introduced animals are thought to have done the dodo the most harm?

Pigs and macaques. Rarely more than fifty people lived on the island at a time in the 1600s, but the animals they set loose raided the birds' nests and ate their food.

An early Dutch description of the dodo, written in 1598, says the Portuguese called the birds what?

Penguins. The name probably had nothing to do with the seabirds, and may instead come from 'pinion', for the dodo's small, inadequate wings.

Which flightless Mauritian bird are later settlers' reports of 'dodos' thought to describe?

The red rail. Settlers who came after the dodo had gone seem to have handed its name on to this hen-sized bird, the flightless one they did meet.

Scans in 2018 revealed what inside the Oxford dodo's head?

Lead shot. The pellets showed that the museum's famous specimen had been shot in the back of the head, though nobody knows whether that happened on Mauritius or after it reached Britain.

A famous story, now thought a myth, says Oxford's museum did what with its decaying dodo in 1755?

Threw it on a fire. In fact the museum's own rules told keepers to move decaying exhibits into store, and the staff kept the parts that could still be saved.

A schoolmaster's workers found the first great haul of dodo bones in 1865 by doing what?

Feeling for them with their feet. George Clark had searched for more than thirty years before his hired labourers waded in and trod on the first of the bones.

Which Victorian anatomist intercepted a shipment of dodo bones meant for a rival so that he could describe the skeleton first?

Richard Owen. He then used his position to head off complaints from Alfred Newton, the Cambridge ornithologist the bones were meant for, and rushed his memoir on the dodo into print.

In which 1865 book does the dodo appear as a character?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Dodo there organises the Caucus-race, in which everyone runs round in circles, nobody loses and all must have prizes.

According to a popular but unproven story, Lewis Carroll identified with the dodo because of what?

His stammer. The tale goes that it made him introduce himself as 'Do-do-Dodgson', his real surname; what is certain is that the Dodo in his book is a caricature of the author.

Which tree was claimed in 1973 to be dying out because its seeds needed to pass through a dodo?

The tambalacoque. Stanley Temple counted only thirteen ancient trees and blamed the loss of the dodo, but later surveys found several hundred, with seeds sprouting unaided.

Besides the coat of arms and coins of Mauritius, the dodo appears as a watermark on what?

All rupee banknotes. Hold one up to the light and a dodo's head appears, so a bird gone within a century of the Dutch landing now guards the nation's money.

A smiling dodo is the emblem of Brasseries de Bourbon, a brewer not on Mauritius but on which island?

Réunion. The island was once called Bourbon, and the logo's white bird recalls the 'white dodo' naturalists wrongly placed there; the old reports really described an ibis.

What does the Center for Biological Diversity call its yearly dodo-themed prize for wrecking wild places?

The Rubber Dodo Award. First handed out in 2007, it has gone to a BP chief executive, a governor of Alaska and the maker of Roundup, each judged that year's worst destroyer of wild places.

The fleet that first described the dodo in 1598 found Mauritius only after what?

A storm split it up. The admiral reached Madagascar with three ships, while his deputy's squadron missed it and came instead upon an uninhabited island full of strange birds.

Which poet included a verse about the dodo in his 1896 Bad Child's Book of Beasts?

Hilaire Belloc. His rhyme notes that the sun still warms the dodo's island but the bird itself can now be seen only as bones in a museum.

A purported dodo egg sits in the South African museum famous for the first coelacanth, in which city?

East London. The egg came down through the family of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator who spotted the coelacanth, and may not be a dodo's at all.

Microscope study of the Oxford dodo's last feathers showed they were what?

Fully vaned. Some early visitors wrote of a bird clothed in down, but the fragments were true vaned feathers, closest in fine structure to those of other pigeons.

Besides Oxford, 17th-century dodo remains survive in Prague and which other city?

Copenhagen. Its skull lay unrecognised in the royal collection until 1840, and the Danish zoologist who rediscovered it soon argued, correctly, that the dodo was a kind of pigeon.

A live dodo sent abroad as a gift in 1647 was valued as equal to a white deer and what?

A bezoar stone. Such stones, formed in an animal's gut, were believed to neutralise any poison, which shows how precious the bird was thought to be.

The Dutch renamed Mauritius after which nobleman when they took it in 1598?

Maurice of Nassau. He was the stadtholder then leading the young Dutch Republic's war against Spain, and the island bears his name again today, though the French who came after the Dutch called it Isle de France.

Which large flightless bird, described in 2001, was only slightly smaller than the dodo?

The Viti Levu giant pigeon. Known only from bones found on Fiji's largest island, it shows that pigeons turned into flightless giants more than once on remote islands.

According to most representations, what colour was the dodo's naked head?

Grey. No complete specimen survives, so the colours have to be read from paintings and sailors' notes, which also give the beak as green, black and yellow.

Where is the 1626 painting known as Edwards's Dodo housed?

The Natural History Museum, London. George Edwards once owned it, and for decades the British Museum hung it beside one of the few real dodo remains in Europe, a relic that has since gone missing.

The first scientific reconstruction of the dodo, in 1866, came out too squat because the bones were fitted to what?

A painting's outline. The anatomist laid the bones out against a famously fat painted dodo, then stood the skeleton more upright a few years later once more bones had arrived.

In which museum was the painting of a dodo attributed to Ustad Mansur rediscovered in the 1950s?

The Hermitage, St Petersburg. The miniature sets a slim brown dodo among other birds painted so accurately that it is trusted as a portrait from life.

The only known sketches of dodos drawn on Mauritius itself survive in what?

A ship's journal. In 1601 a trained artist aboard the Gelderland, thought to be Joris Laerle, drew live and freshly killed dodos in its log while the fleet lay at anchor off Mauritius.