Dodo Trivia
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50 free Dodo trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The dodo has been extinct for more than 350 years, yet it is one of the most famous birds that ever lived, and this quiz covers what is really known about it. It starts with the animal: a giant flightless pigeon from Mauritius whose closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, how tall and heavy it was, why it lost the power of flight, what it ate, the gizzard stones it swallowed, and its single-egg clutch. It moves on to the people: the Dutch sailors of 1598 who called it the 'loathsome bird', the Mughal painter who portrayed one in Jahangir's menagerie, Roelant Savery's fat dodos, and the London showman who fed his bird pebbles in 1638. Then the disappearance and the afterlife: the disputed last sighting of 1662, the pigs and macaques that did more damage than hunters, the schoolmaster who found the bones in the Mare aux Songes swamp, the Oxford head with lead shot in it, Lewis Carroll's stammer, the dodo tree myth, and the bird's place on the coat of arms of Mauritius. Easy questions ask which island and which bird family; hard ones want Dutch etymology, museum specimen histories and DNA dates. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the dodo, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Birds and Extinct Animals quizzes go wider.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The dodo's home island of Mauritius lies in which body of water?
The Indian Ocean
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.
Q 02Which US biotech firm, already trying to revive the woolly mammoth, announced a plan in 2023 to bring back the dodo?
Colossal Biosciences
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.
Q 03What is the dodo's closest living relative?
The Nicobar pigeon
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.
Q 04The dodo's closest relative of all, also extinct and flightless, was which bird?
The Rodrigues solitaire
The Rodrigues solitaire. Unlike the dodo it had large bony knobs on its wings, which rivals swung at each other in fights over territory.
Q 05A Dutch account of the 1598 voyage called the dodo twice as big as which bird?
A swan
A swan. Four years later another captain wrote that his crew caught the birds to eat and took a number on board for salting.
Q 06What did the dodo swallow to help digest its food?
Gizzard stones
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.
Q 07Where is the dodo thought to have nested?
On the ground
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.
Q 08Why is the dodo presumed to have become flightless?
Abundant food and no predators
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.
Q 09Which naturalist made the dodo the symbol of the wildlife trust and zoo he founded on the island of Jersey?
Gerald Durrell
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.
Q 10The last widely accepted dodo sighting, in 1662, came from a survivor of what?
Shipwreck
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.
Q 11Of the last stuffed dodo, kept at Oxford, only the head and which other part were saved?
A foot
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.
Q 12Most subfossil dodo bones have come from which site on Mauritius?
The Mare aux Songes swamp
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.
Q 13A 2017 study of dodo bones suggested chicks grew fast so as to be sturdy before which yearly hazard on Mauritius?
The cyclone season
Q 21A 17th-century painting attributed to Ustad Mansur probably shows a dodo in whose menagerie?
Emperor Jahangir's
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.
Q 22How did dodos react when people first walked up to them?
They showed no fear
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.
Q 23Hamon L'Estrange saw a live dodo in 1638 in which city?
London
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.
Q 14Despite its clumsy image, the dodo is now thought to have been able to do what?
Run quite fast
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'.
Q 15The Dutch name 'Walghvoghel', first used for the dodo in 1598, means what?
Loathsome bird
Loathsome bird. Walgen means to sicken, and the crew complained that the meat grew tougher and more tasteless the longer it was cooked.
Q 16One theory traces the word 'dodo' to the Dutch 'dodaars', which means what?
Fat-arse or knot-arse
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.
Q 17A 2016 study of the dodo's braincase found an unusually large region devoted to which sense?
Smell
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.
Q 18In 1758 Linnaeus placed the dodo in the same genus as which other bird?
The ostrich
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.
Q 19The dodo's Latin species name cucullatus means what?
Hooded
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.
Q 20Which Dutch painter was the most prolific illustrator of the dodo?
Roelant Savery
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.
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.
Q 24Besides Europe, a live dodo was shipped in 1647 as a gift to which distant country?
Japan
Japan. Documents published in 2014 showed that the bird reached Nagasaki alive, which makes it the last dodo ever recorded in captivity.
Q 25Which introduced animals are thought to have done the dodo the most harm?
Pigs and macaques
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.
Q 26An early Dutch description of the dodo, written in 1598, says the Portuguese called the birds what?
Penguins
Penguins. The name probably had nothing to do with the seabirds, and may instead come from 'pinion', for the dodo's small, inadequate wings.
Q 27Which flightless Mauritian bird are later settlers' reports of 'dodos' thought to describe?
The red rail
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.
Q 28Scans in 2018 revealed what inside the Oxford dodo's head?
Lead shot
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.
Q 29A famous story, now thought a myth, says Oxford's museum did what with its decaying dodo in 1755?
Threw it on a fire
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.
Q 30A schoolmaster's workers found the first great haul of dodo bones in 1865 by doing what?
Feeling for them with their feet
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.