“Perhaps no creature has been so widely written about yet so poorly understood,” said Julian Hume, an avian paleontologist and an author of the ne

Who’s the Dodo Now? A Famously Extinct Bird, Reconsidered.

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2024-09-20 16:00:17

“Perhaps no creature has been so widely written about yet so poorly understood,” said Julian Hume, an avian paleontologist and an author of the new study. Credit... Florilegius/Alamy Stock Photo

The dodo was a flightless bird about the size of a male turkey that had a long, hooked beak and the goofy charm of an emperor penguin. Its ancestor first appeared on Earth more than 25 million years ago, and by 1662, because of humans, it had vanished from Mauritius, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, the only place it ever existed.

The dodo has since become fixed in society’s imagination as the very emblem of ineptitude, an evolutionary clown — an impression greatly helped by the bird’s appearance in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in 1865. In 1941, the humorist Will Cuppy wrote that the dodo — with an ugly face, a misplaced tail, too-small wings and a prominent stomach — seemed to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct. “You can’t look like that and survive,” he mused. “Or can you?”

Neil Gostling, a paleobiologist at the University of Southampton in England, listens to these aspersions and laughs. “Eighty-three years later, the idea persists that dodos were slow, fat, useless balls of feathers that blundered into their own demise,” he said. “The fact is that the birds were fast, agile and, before being wiped out, had been doing their thing and doing it incredibly well for about 12 million years.”