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The Dodo Thread

mejane

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Jan 17, 2002
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Pic 3 is clearly a dodo in a Batman cape.

... which would be a fortean subject by itself :)

Does anyone remember the name of the book about dodo-like birds found alive and well on a small South Pacific island? I think it was written by the man who set up Jersey zoo (whose name escapes me now...).

Stop me if I begin to make sense ;)

Jane.
 
The bloke who set up Jersey Zoo mejane was Gerald Durrell, BUT I can't remember the title of the book, try looking in Amazon.
 
The only Dodo-like bird i can think of is the Samoan tooth-billed pigeon (Didunculus strigirostris) it has a dodo like face but still can fly and doesnt really have the proportions of a Dodo.
Not many people know that apart from the dodo on Mauritius (Rapphus cucullatus) which died out 1681ish, there was a similar species on Rodriques, a Solitaire (Pezophaps solitarius) which died out in the 1750's. And possibly even a white dodo on the island of Reunion.
The mascarene islands were completely screwed by people. Many types of Rail and other flightless birds as well as giant tortoises (like those in the Galapagos) were extirpated within a hundred years of first contact.
its enough to make anyone despair of humanity.
BTW i cant seem to find a good photo of the tooth-billed pigeon anywhere.
 
Thanks David. The book is The Mocking Bird which is now, sadly, out of print. (Pure fiction but funny and thought-provoking all the same).

I recall hearing that the giant turtles of Mauritius were used by sailors as an early form of take-away fast food - keep them in the ship's hold, then crack one open as needed :eek:

I do sometimes think it's time to step aside and let the cockroaches take over...

Jane.
 
Roy P. Mackal thinks that dodos might still be found on some of the small uninhabited islands in the area, such as the Cargados Carajos Shoals.

There was a good TV show about dodos a couple of weeks ago, part of the 'Extinct' series. It gave some fascinating facts:

-Dodos weren't stupid and docile. They could be mean and aggressive, using the bump on the end of their beaks as a weapon.

-Disruption of nesting by feral pigs, rather than hunting for food, was the main cause of extinction. Dodos tasted so bad that they were only eaten when nothing else was available. Garbage dumps of the time contain few dodo bones.

-'Dodo' derives from the Dutch for 'fat-ass'.
 
There was a Biggles story, of him & his mates finding piles of dodo's on a lost island in the Indian Ocean. Maybe, old W E Johns knew a thing or two?;)
 
thanks for the links sally, but what i was looking for was an actual photo of one rather than a drawing- found one here.
http://www.samoalive.com/Museum2.htm
scroll down a bit.
Seems that like every other interesting species its on the edge of extinction cos of us.
 
I figure once they get cloning down, the first extinct animal they'll clone is a mammoth. Are there any stuffed dodos, anywhere in the world? I'd do that one next.
 
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hachihyaku said:
.....Are there any stuffed dodos, anywhere in the world? ...

Chambers St museum, Edinburgh, as I recall - although it may be a model rather than a specimen.
 
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hey guys- this is what i kinda know about. I want to do my PhD on phylogenetics of extinct species. Was down in oxford last week speaking to Dr. Alan Cooper. The guy who cloned the complete mitochondrial genome of the giant Moa. Very cool guy.

One of his Post grads is working right now on Dodo DNA and how it evolved from mere pigeons. Should be in this months Science

DerekH- the chambers st. museum one is a model, although the curator of the museum- Andrew Kitchener- is a bit of an expert on Dodos so its probably quite a good likeness.

There are NO stuffed Dodos anywhere in the world. the sum of our anatomical knowledge comes from bones from the Mare aux songes swamp in Mauritius. A head and foot (badly rotten- the Ashmolean museum had a stuffed dodo till about 1720 but under a statute saying that if it got mouldy it had to be replaced meant that it was sent to be burnt. A canny curator cut off the head and foot. Odf course by this time there was no Dodos left to replace the specimen with.) i think there is also a head in Copenhagen museum but that is it.
 
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If you want to see the preserved head and foot. This is them here:

ulg.ac.be/museezoo/img29.htm
Link is dead. Here is the image (sole content of the MIA webpage), salvaged from the Wayback Machine.


img29b3.jpg
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20030319104121/https://www.ulg.ac.be/museezoo/img29.htm

A skeleton is here:

senckenberg.uni-frankfurt.de/jpgs/vogel1.jpg
Link is dead. Here is the image (sole content of the MIA webpage), salvaged from the Wayback Machine.


vogel1.jpg
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20030127053454/http://senckenberg.uni-frankfurt.de/jpgs/vogel1.jpg

For size- A dodo was about the size of a large turkey.
 
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Not so dead as a Dodo

Dodos belong to the pigeon and dove family, so with the genetic information from the bits and piece of them left in museums and some tweaking, perhaps they're candidates for retinction.

Some info at:
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0227_0228_dodo.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed at the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2003081...ographic.com/news/2002/02/0227_0228_dodo.html


And perhaps one day we'll see this for real:

thursdaynext.com/petedave.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20031004164641/http://www.thursdaynext.com/petedave.html

:D
 
RE: Dodo Edibility:

Actually, that's one of the reasons it wasn't preserved and instead was ruthlessly exterminated - the sailors who first landed on Mauritius found that it was practically inedible. As it was flightless, and had been for generations, it had hardly any breast meat, and due to it's size it's leg meat was very dark, tough, oily and by all accounts tasted horrendous. Not worth keeping and eating, therefore wipe it out. Ain't we a great species?
 
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Indeed, the reports from sailors all say that it tasted horrible and was incredibly greasy.
 
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IIRC, "dodo" is Portuguese for "stupid", the birds so-named for their habit of waddling up to stangers to see what all the fuss was about; they were eventually killed-off by rats (no doubt escaped from a sinking ship).
 
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Scientists find 'mass dodo grave'
Scientists have discovered the "beautifully preserved" bones of about 20 dodos at a dig site in Mauritius.
Little is known about the dodo, a famous flightless bird thought to have become extinct in the 17th Century.

No complete skeleton has ever been found in Mauritius, and the last full set of bones was destroyed in a fire at a museum in Oxford, England, in 1755.

Researchers believe the bones are at least 2,000 years old, and hope to learn more about how dodos lived.

A team of Dutch and Mauritian scientists discovered the bones in a swampy area near a sugar plantation on the south-east of the island.

The bones were said to have been recovered from a single layer of earth, with the prospect of further excavations to come.

Sections of beaks and the remains of dodo chicks were thought to be among the find.

'Foolish' bird

The discovery was hailed as a breakthrough in the Netherlands.

"This new find will allow for the first scientific research into and reconstruction of the world in which the dodo lived, before western man landed on Mauritius and wiped out the species," the country's Natural History Museum announced in a statement.

Dutch geologist Kenneth Rijsdijk, who led the dig, said DNA samples from the dodo bones could revolutionise our understanding of how the birds lived.

The dodo was mocked by Portuguese and Dutch colonialists for its size and apparent lack of fear of armed, hungry hunters.

It took its name from the Portuguese word for "fool", and was hunted to extinction within 200 years of Europeans landing on Mauritius.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4556928.stm
 
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I read that accounts of them at the time said they were greasy, stringy tough and tasted quite horrid.
 
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I read something by Karl Shuker once about how there's been a few modern sightings of dodos in the more inaccessible regions of Mauritius. Might have been in FT or one of his books, I can't remember and can't be arsed to dig it out at the moment (but will!).

Maybe the ones who were scared of man survived and bred...

It would be a great irony if they spent billions cloning a dodo, only for someone to find a living one a few weeks later...
 
Nothing to do with the cloning issue, but I understood that the word "dodo" came not from Portuguese but from the Dutch for "fat arse", a fairly apt name, I reckon. Mind you, as said before, the remaining dodo specimens in museums probably don't have that much real bird in them, so possibly we don't have any clue what they look like.
 
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An apt name.

The Dodos food was seasonal so they had to store up fat for out of season times.

Most depicted examples are of captive birds who indeed did grow rotund.
 
As promised, living dodos (at least in the 1930's)...

From Green, Lawrence, Secret Africa (Stanley Paul, 1936), quoted in Shuker, Karl, Extraordinary Animals Worldwide (Robert Hale, 1991), pp86-90.

But is the dodo dead? I have looked upon the bones of the dodo in the museum at Port Louis, Mauritius, and I have heard the island people talk of the bird. Now these people living in the very home of the dodo never speak of it as extinct. They will tell you that the dodo has been seen many times since 1681 - the year in which the last dodo was supposed to have died. They declare, in fact, that the dodo still lives in remote parts of the island, in inaccessible cliff caves and mountain forests.

And this from Cryptozoology.com http://www.cryptozoology.com/glossary/g ... .php?id=20

Perhaps the most well known ?extinct? animal next to the dinosaurs and ice age mammals is the Dodo bird, Raphus cucullatus. Done in by it?s fearlessness of man and the introduction of monkeys, rats, and pigs to it?s island home, the Dodo ?officially? disappeared from Mauritius in 1681. With it?s solitaire cousins surviving on Rèunion until 1750 and on Rodriguez until 1800. So it appears the dodo was dead forever, extinct. Or was it?

An article appearing in London?s The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported that an Englishman vacationing in Mauritius spied a Dodo walking along the beach. A similar report appeared two years earlier, made by a Frenchman visiting Mauritius. It?s thought that these reports are either hoaxes or misidentifications of known birds, perhaps the giant petrel. It?s also reported from the people of Mauritius that Dodo like birds can be seen at dusk and at dawn along the beaches of a secluded rainforest known as Plain Champagne. Nevertheless, the likelihood of even a few Dodo?s escaping a hungry sailors stomach or the infectious rats is remotely slim. For any of the three major islands in the Mascarenes group at least.

There are a number of minor Mascarenes islands that are scarcely visited, some of which have never even been explored. These are the islands that living Dodo?s might just be discovered on one day in the future. Researcher Bill Gibbons intends to carry out a number of expeditions to the Mascarenes isles in search of the Dodo. To date none have been rediscovered.
 
Not sure these guys are out of place but if true they are out of time. The Dodo bird was known to exist only on the Island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. I wasn't able to determine where this video was taken or by whom, but it's purported to be 3 flightless Dodo's running for the their lives after being spooked by the drone. See what you think. Actual drone footage begins at the 1:46 Mark. It's not much and it's short.

 
Not sure these guys are out of place but if true they are out of time. The Dodo bird was known to exist only on the Island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. I wasn't able to determine where this video was taken or by whom, but it's purported to be 3 flightless Dodo's running for the their lives after being spooked by the drone. See what you think. Actual drone footage begins at the 1:46 Mark. It's not much and it's short.


Good fun, but those birds could be anything at that distance.

We are further supposed to believe that they fled on foot rather than flew on being spooked by the drone because they couldn't fly as they were dodos. How about the idea that they weren't spooked by the drone at all and were just running about in the mud looking for food or something else--and not many animals instinctively run into a more exposed area that the one they currently inhabit.
 
I agree it's probably wishful thinking at best. You would think that this footage would gain more interest by bird types.
I am wondering about this video and others in my own typically suspicious manner. The dodo was on a list of creatures that scientist's wanted to re-create, and the founder of paypal has funded an attempt to re-create a woolly mammoth recently. Some links out there somewhere's on that one. This one from the National Geographic saying they could do it;
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/woolly-mammoths-extinction-cloning-genetics/

So I'm wondering if what we are seeing in these video's might be refugee's from a genetics lab. Like ya know, we made these dodo''s and now some of the dang things have escaped.
 
So I'm wondering if what we are seeing in these video's might be refugee's from a genetics lab. Like ya know, we made these dodo''s and now some of the dang things have escaped.

I think that explanation takes even more believing than the 'dodos persist undiscovered in the wild' yarn?
And why would the genetic recreation of a dodo be kept secret anyway? Clandestine Military Dodos?
 
I note the surface of the water looks remarkably undisturbed by their passing.
 
I think that explanation takes even more believing than the 'dodos persist undiscovered in the wild' yarn?
And why would the genetic recreation of a dodo be kept secret anyway? Clandestine Military Dodos?

Universe enjoys making me the butt of it's jokes. Probably not accidental that the entire thing involved Dodo's. Military Dodo's...I'm going to be snickering for days ya know. Like oh yes, lets just strap some C-4 on to the backsides of these and let them waddle into the starving enemy camp.

I wasn't giving it a lot of thought when I posted it, but there's some interesting things to be on the lookout for along the lines of the thread. Like why are we now having these creatures show up in places they have never been seen before? So in thinking about this a slight amount...not much...there's a growing sub cult of biohackers, and there's also covert biohacking backed by corporate interest.

So I know the whole Dodo thing sounds absurdly stupid, but that's on the surface, and beneath is the understanding that if you're going to try to bring back an extinct species you would need to be using critters whose DNA was as close as that of the extinct species. The main reason this stuff would be secret is because of all the laws that have been passed to prevent this kind of thing from going on.

So now just go back up a few posts and what have we got? What's this, the Nicobar Pigeon? In Australia? It just so happens that the dodo's closest living relatives are pigeons, specifically the Nicobar Pigeon.
National Geographic from 2002.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0227_0228_dodo.html

What makes the dodo so attractive is that it's one of the rarest of all, even dead and stuffed they are the rarest of the rare. This makes them very valuable. I think is was the Smithsonian in DC that traded an entire blue whale skeleton for a dodo skeleton. So there's money to be made for sure if these flightless birds could be brought back.

What else there might be that makes these birds attractive I don't know, but again they were listed as among the ten most desired extinct species which scientists hoped to bring back. So mainly I'm thinking escaped wildlife from secret labs. Either run by corporations, biohackers, or maybe even nation states. It may seem a far fetched notion but I'd lay money on it right now that before the next 20 years pass one or more of these critters will be revived somewhere by someone.
 
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