Dodo (Raphus cucullatus): Facts, Extinction and Appearance

What kind of animal was the dodo?

The dodo was a bird, and more surprisingly a member of the pigeon and dove family, Columbidae. Early naturalists guessed it might be a kind of ostrich, vulture or albatross, but anatomical studies in the 1840s and DNA analysis in 2002 showed that it was a giant ground-dwelling pigeon.

Its closest relative was the Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), another extinct flightless pigeon from the island of Rodrigues, about 560 km (350 miles) east of Mauritius. Its closest living relative is the colorful Nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica) of Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. The full story is told in Was the dodo a pigeon?

The name “dodo” probably comes from early Dutch names for the bird; one of them, dodaars, roughly meant “knot-arse”, after the tuft of curly feathers on its rear. The Dutch also called it walghvogel, or “nauseating bird”, because sailors found its meat tough and tasteless after long cooking.

What did the dodo look like?

No complete stuffed dodo survives, so its appearance is reconstructed from bones, a preserved head and foot, and about twenty 17th-century drawings and paintings, not all made from life. Most accounts describe gray or brownish plumage, a tuft of curly pale feathers on the rear, small wings with a few stiff feathers, and a bare gray face.

The most striking feature was the beak. It was long, heavy and hooked at the tip, colored in shades of black, green and yellow according to early accounts. The legs were thick, strong and yellowish, with black claws. Males were larger than females and had proportionally longer beaks.

Famous paintings, especially those by the Dutch artist Roelant Savery in the 1620s, show a very fat, almost round bird. Scientists now think many of these were based on overfed captive birds or badly stuffed specimens. Studies of skeletons suggest the wild dodo was more upright and less bulky. Read more in What did the dodo look like?

How big was a dodo?

Dodos were among the largest pigeons that ever lived. Subfossil bones show that they stood about 63–75 cm (25–30 in) tall. Weight estimates vary between studies: most modern estimates for wild birds fall between about 10 and 18 kg (22 and 39 lb), with a 2016 study based on CT scans of skeletons suggesting 10.6–14.3 kg (23–32 lb).

Older estimates of 20 kg (44 lb) or more were probably based on fattened captive birds. Some researchers suggest dodos varied in weight through the year, building up fat in the season when fruit was plentiful and slimming down in the dry season. For comparison, the Nicobar pigeon weighs only about 0.5 kg (1.1 lb).

Habitat and diet

The dodo lived only on Mauritius, a volcanic island of about 1,860 square km (720 square miles) east of Madagascar. Before people arrived, the island was covered in forest. Early accounts suggest dodos were common in the drier woods near the coast in the south and west, and bones found in upland caves show they also lived in the hills.

Little was written about what dodos ate. A Dutch letter from 1631 says their food was raw fruit, and scientists think they ate fallen fruits, seeds and nuts, and perhaps bulbs and roots. Like many pigeons and other plant-eating birds, they swallowed stones that sat in the gizzard, a muscular part of the stomach, and helped grind tough food. Their strong, hooked beaks could crack hard seeds, and they probably played an important role in spreading the seeds of native trees.

Behavior and breeding

Very little is known about the behavior of living dodos. Sailors described them as fearless and slow to flee, but studies of their leg bones suggest they could run quite fast through the forest when they wanted to. Their small wings were probably used for display and balance.

Only one 17th-century account describes breeding: it says the dodo laid a single large white egg in a nest of grass on the forest floor. That account is unreliable in other details, but a single egg is common in pigeons and would fit a large, slow-breeding island bird. A 2017 study of growth rings in dodo bones suggested that chicks grew quickly to near adult size, that breeding took place around August, and that adults molted their feathers after the southern summer.

Why did the dodo go extinct?

Mauritius had no people, cats, rats, pigs or monkeys until European ships began calling in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Dutch claimed the island in 1598 and later settled it. Sailors did kill and eat dodos, but the human population was tiny, never more than about 50 people in the 17th century.

The bigger damage came from animals people brought with them. Pigs, crab-eating macaques, rats, dogs and cats ate dodo eggs and chicks or competed for fallen fruit, while settlers cleared forest for timber and farms. The last widely accepted sighting was in 1662, and the species was probably extinct by around 1700. The full story is in Why did the dodo go extinct?

Dodo remains in museums

For a long time the dodo was so poorly known that some people doubted it had ever existed. The only soft tissue left is a dried head and foot at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, from a bird that was once part of a 17th-century collection of curiosities in London. Other early remains include a skull in Copenhagen and part of a skull in Prague.

In 1865, a schoolteacher named George Clark found large numbers of dodo bones in the Mare aux Songes marsh in southeastern Mauritius, and since then the remains of hundreds of birds have been recovered. Most skeletons in museums are composites built from bones of several individuals. Only two complete skeletons of single birds are known, one found in a cave in 1904 and now in Port Louis, Mauritius, and one found in 2006.

Life on Mauritius before people

The dodo was one of many unusual animals that evolved on Mauritius in isolation. The island rose from the sea as a volcano about 8 million years ago and was never connected to a continent, so its animals arrived by flying, swimming or drifting. There were no native land mammals except bats, and no large predators on the ground.

In that world, birds and reptiles filled the roles taken by mammals elsewhere. Two species of giant tortoise grazed the forests, the flightless red rail probed the leaf litter, and the large broad-billed parrot cracked hard nuts. Almost all of these disappeared within a century or two of human arrival, together with the dodo, several other birds, giant skinks and a large fruit bat.

Some of the island’s survivors came very close to the same fate. The Mauritius kestrel was reduced to just four known wild birds in 1974, and the pink pigeon, a member of the same pigeon family as the dodo, fell to only about ten wild birds around 1990. Intensive conservation work on Mauritius, including captive breeding, predator control and forest restoration, has since brought both species back to the hundreds, a hopeful contrast to the story of the dodo.

Myths and facts about the dodo

Myth: dodos were killed off by hungry sailors. People did hunt dodos, but archaeological evidence of hunting is limited. Introduced animals and habitat loss are now considered more important.

Myth: dodos were fat and stupid. Their fat look comes largely from paintings of overfed captive birds, and a 2016 study of the dodo’s brain found it was about the size expected for a pigeon of its body size. Dodos seemed foolish only because they had evolved without predators and had no fear of people.

Myth: a tree on Mauritius cannot grow without dodos. In the 1970s a researcher suggested that the tambalacoque, or “dodo tree”, could only germinate after its seeds passed through a dodo’s gut. Later studies showed that its seeds can germinate without dodos and that several hundred trees survive.

The dodo in culture and de-extinction

The dodo became world-famous through Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which a Dodo organizes a “caucus race”. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, is thought to have identified with the bird, perhaps because his stammer made him say “Do-do-Dodgson”. Expressions such as “dead as a dodo” and “going the way of the dodo” mean something is gone for good. The dodo also appears on the coat of arms of Mauritius.

In 2023 the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences announced a project to recreate a dodo-like bird by editing the genes of the Nicobar pigeon. Whether that would produce a true dodo is debated; see Could the dodo be brought back? The dodo also features on our list of flightless birds.