What Did the Dodo Look Like? Fat Myth vs Real Bird

The dodo’s appearance in brief

No stuffed dodo survives, so everything we know about the dodo’s looks comes from four kinds of evidence: bones, a few preserved body parts, written descriptions by 17th-century sailors and travelers, and around twenty drawings and paintings made between 1598 and the 1660s. These sources agree on the main features.

• Size: about 63–75 cm (25–30 in) tall, with males larger than females.
• Plumage: gray or brownish-gray, with lighter wing feathers. Feathers from the preserved Oxford head are similar to those of other pigeons, not fluffy down.
• Head: bare, gray skin on the face, giving the bird a “hooded” look that inspired its scientific name cucullatus, meaning hooded.
• Beak: very long and heavy, with a hooked tip, described as black, green and yellow.
• Wings: small and stubby, with a few stiff, dark feathers, useless for flight.
• Tail: a small tuft of curly, pale feathers set high on the rump.
• Legs and feet: thick, strong and yellowish, with black claws.

Why do old paintings show a fat dodo?

The classic image of a round, waddling dodo comes mainly from the Dutch-Flemish painter Roelant Savery, who painted the bird at least twelve times. His most famous picture, painted in 1626 and known as Edwards’s Dodo, is now in the Natural History Museum in London. It shows a very plump bird and was copied by many later artists.

Savery and other European painters probably worked from dodos that had been shipped to Europe and kept in menageries, or from stuffed specimens. Captive birds on long sea voyages and in private collections were likely overfed and inactive, and taxidermists of the time had no accurate idea of the living bird’s shape. Some researchers also suggest that dodos fluffed out their feathers as a display, which would make them look larger.

Written descriptions added to the impression. The English traveler Thomas Herbert wrote in 1634 that few dodos weighed less than fifty pounds, about 23 kg, a figure now thought to be an exaggeration or based on fattened birds.

Which pictures are the most accurate?

Only a few images were certainly drawn from living or freshly killed birds on Mauritius. The most important are sketches made around 1601–1602 in the journal of the Dutch ship Gelderland, which show leaner, more upright birds than Savery’s paintings.

Another valuable picture is an Indian Mughal painting, attributed to the artist Ustad Mansur and rediscovered in 1955 in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. It shows a slimmer, brownish dodo among accurately painted Indian birds, probably an individual kept in the menagerie of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. Many experts regard it as one of the most realistic portraits of a living dodo.

What do the bones show?

When large numbers of dodo bones were found in the Mare aux Songes marsh on Mauritius in 1865, scientists could finally reconstruct the skeleton. The British anatomist Richard Owen first modeled it on Savery’s fat painting, producing a squat bird, but he made his reconstruction more upright a few years later as more bones arrived.

Modern studies support a leaner, more active bird. Weight estimates for wild dodos range from about 10 to 18 kg (22 to 39 lb), and a 2016 study based on CT scans of skeletons suggested 10.6–14.3 kg (23–32 lb). Strong leg bones indicate that dodos could probably run quite fast. Bone studies also suggest that dodos may have put on fat during the season when fruit was plentiful and slimmed down in the lean months, so a dodo’s shape might have changed through the year.

How big was a dodo compared with other birds?

A dodo was bigger and heavier than a large turkey, as one 17th-century visitor who saw a live dodo in London noted, and it was one of the biggest pigeons that ever lived. Its closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon, is only about 32–35 cm (13–14 in) long and weighs around 0.5 kg (1.1 lb), so a dodo outweighed it about twenty times or more. Read more about the dodo’s family in Was the dodo a pigeon?

Which dodo remains survive?

Despite its fame, very little of the dodo survives apart from bones. The most precious specimen is at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History: a dried head and foot, the only soft tissue left of any dodo. They come from a stuffed bird listed in a London collection of curiosities in 1656. In 2018, scans revealed lead shot in the head, showing that this bird had been shot.

Other early remains include a skull in the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and the front part of a skull in the National Museum in Prague. Most dodo skeletons on display in museums today, including those in London, Cambridge and New York, are built from bones of several individuals found in the Mare aux Songes. Only two complete skeletons of single birds are known: one found in a cave in 1904 and kept in Port Louis, Mauritius, and another discovered in a lava cave in 2006.

Many “stuffed dodos” in museums are models made from the feathers of other birds such as geese and chickens, and the model shown on this page is a modern reconstruction. To understand why such a striking bird disappeared so quickly, see Why did the dodo go extinct?