However, it has been pointed out that this may be a consequence of their natural habitat. Secondly, the dodo is often depicted as a grossly overweight and gluttonous animal. You can see that the tail, beak, eyes, and wings are not quite so… silly. However, to the right is a more accurate reconstruction of the bird. We can thank the illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for cementing this in the public mind. The bird to the right is the popular depiction of the dodo. Left: A reconstruction, Right: The popular image For a good example of what I am talking about consider the following picture. Many sketches and accounts can agree on the basic concept of what a dodo looked like, but many of the details have been embellished or romanticized by the general populace. We have become so enamored with the fuddy-duddy bird of Lewis Carroll that we ignore the real bird.įirstly, the traditional image of the dodo is somewhat skewed. However, much of the facts we know about this bird are actually romanticized or incomplete myths. There was a bird named the dodo and it did go extinct, yes. This funny, ugly bird, an evolutionary dead-end and a parable of living without natural predators, would be dead within two hundred years.īut this is not quite true. This little island, far off the coast of Madagascar, was for them a simple windfall of rest and supplies.įor the island’s inhabitants however, which included a squat homely bird, unblessed with any graces (even it’s meat was foul and unpalatable) known as the dodo, the Portuguese were the beginning of a incoming storm of environmental destruction, hunting, and extinction. However, the Indies were still a far distance away and the entire Indian Ocean lay between the sailors and their destination. They had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and South Africa only a few weeks earlier, passing through the querulous south Atlantic.

In 1505, Portuguese sailors stepped onto the island of Mauritius.

Real dodo tree