Extinct Critters – What am I?
Posted by Kritter Girl on March 12, 2007
I couldn’t fly because my wings were too weak you see,
On an island off Madagascar in the forest is where I use to be.
I lost my home and predators came so I am no longer alive,
Maybe if people were looking out for me I could have survived.
What critter am I? Care to know ……
If you guessed the Dodo bird you were right!
About 560 miles east of Madagascar on an island call Mauritius was the only home of the Dodo bird.
What we know about the appearance of the Dodo today is based on the diaries and writings of captains and sailors who landed on Mauritius and the drawings done from the few humans who saw them. The Dodo was a large plump soft-grey feathered bird weighing up to 50 pounds a bit bigger than a full grown turkey and a member of the Columbidea or pigeon family. With a nine inch hooked bill one of its most distinguishing features, small sharp eyes and enormous stomach, stubby wings and stumpy short legs. Its home was in the forest even though many stories and pictures place them on the shores.
Dodos ate seeds and fruits, readily available on the forest floor in Mauritius. With a generous food supply on the ground and no predators, Dodos didn’t need to fly. At one time it was thought that Calvaria trees were dependent on the Dodo for reproduction: the Dodos ate the seeds and cracked the seed coat, passing viable seeds in their feces. The theory has been discounted however, and Calvaria trees are still with us.[1]
It is believed that a group of Portuguese sailors who were on their way to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa were blown off course by stormy conditions and ended up on Mauritius in 1507. The Dodo was a source of food for the sailors when they were running out of supplies, it’s been said that the meat wasn’t very tasty. In 1644 Mauritius was colonized by the Dutch, with the people the ships also brought cats, dogs, and swine. The domestic animals brought disturbance to the woods, trampling the Dodo’s nest frightening the birds, eating their eggs and the young birds. The domestic animals along with the over killing of the Dodo for food led to its total extinction by 1681.
The dodo probably died out in 1690, nearly 30 years later than the last confirmed sighting of the bird.
Some of the flightless birds survived unseen for decades, according to a statistical analysis by scientists reported in the journal Nature. The last confirmed sighting of the dodo was in 1662 on Mauritius. By then the species had long been in decline, driven to extinction by humans and the predators they took to the Indian Ocean Island. All that remains of the dodo now are the odd skeleton and other body parts, such as head and feet, scattered around the world in museums. Fragments of DNA have been extracted from the bones, shedding light on its evolution. “But when a species becomes increasingly rare before its final extinction, it may continue to exist unseen for many years – so the time of its last sighting may be a poor estimate of the time of extinction[ii]
In October 2005, part of the Mare aux Songes, the most important site of dodo remains, was excavated by an international team of researchers. Many remains were found, including bones from birds of various stages of maturity, and several bones obviously belonging to the skeleton of one individual bird and preserved in natural position. These findings were made public in December 2005 in the Naturalis in Leiden. Before this, few associated dodo specimens were known, most of the material consisting of isolated and scattered bones. Dublin’s Natural History Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, among others, has a specimen assembled from these disassociated remains. A Dodo egg is on display at the East London museum in South Africa. The most intact remains, currently on display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, are one individual’s partly skeletal foot and head which contain the only known soft tissue remains of the species.
These are the remains of the last known stuffed dodo, which had been kept in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. By the mid-18th century, the specimen – save the pieces remaining now – had entirely decayed and was ordered to be discarded by the museum’s curator or director in or around 1755[3].
[1]Mysterious Extinct Dodo
Myth Blaster - Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" « Lighthouse Patriot Journal said
[...] Responsible attention to the concerns of pollution and truly scientific ecology is encouraged here – but junk science and the likes of Al Gore must go the way of the dinosaur and the Dodo bird. [...]
Knut – The Orphaned Polar Bear Cub « Kritter Korner said
[...] time when it concerns the natural world of animals. As in Kritter Girl’s article about the Dodo bird – an animal who had a limited area of existence and fresh-meat foragers in the form of [...]