Answering Questions About the Extinct Dodo Bird

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle Aug 10, 2006

Update on the first family of Whooping Cranes in Wisconsin: there is a new photograph of the 41-day-old twin wild chicks born in the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge. They're looking great and growing fast. If you're interested in a different kind of adventure, you can sign on with Adventure Canada to travel part of the migration route of the Whooping Cranes from Wisconsin, south. The trip will take place in early October, 2006. Contact information is provided to the right of the chick photograph at the link above.

We're going all out to save the Whooping Crane from extinction, but a lot of other birds haven't been so lucky. The Dodo bird is probably the most famous extinct bird: none of us have ever seen one, but just about everyone knows what they looked like. For a bird that survived into relatively recent history, we know astonishingly little about it. It comes as a surprise to learn that a complete skeleton of a Dodo bird has never been found - until now. National Geographic reported in the August, 2006 (page 22) issue that an extensive fossil bed has been discovered in Mauritius, including the remains of about 20 Dodo birds. The bird remains, remains of other animals, and preserved plants, will provide a lot of information about what the ecosystem of Mauritius was like 3000 years ago. It should also tell us a lot we didn't know about the Dodo bird.

The fossil bed was discovered in the fall of 2005 by researchers from the Geological Survey of the Netherlands, Drs. Kenneth Rijsdijk and Frans Bunnik. Excavation of the site is in progress. Carl Zimmer wrote about this project in the New York Times in July, 2006.

Read my article on what we already know about the Dodo bird.