The dodo's official date of extinction isn't certain. Today, the dodo is officially listed as extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. If any of the precious eggs survived and hatched, the introduced animals likely outcompeted juvenile and adult dodos for a limited food supply, Hume wrote in 2006 in the journal Historical Biology. But for the new arrivals on the island, those nutritious, easy meals were conveniently located within easy reach on the forest floor. Tragically for the dodos, each devoured egg represented a female dodo's only chance for reproduction that year. Rather, a host of introduced species - including rats, pigs, goats and monkeys - likely caught and ate dodos and their eggs, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. (Image credit: ZU_09/Getty Images)Īnd it wasn't just humans who consumed the dodos. Wildlife on Mauritius evolved to fill various ecological niches, but these isolated species were slow to respond to newly arrived threats from across the ocean, National Geographic reported.For example, dodos were said to have no fear of humans who landed on their island beaches, so the birds were easily caught and killed by hungry Dutch sailors.Īrtistic representations of dodos historically represented the birds as rotund, slow and clumsy, but recent research hints otherwise. Highly specialized to its environment, the flightless and slow-to-reproduce species was vulnerable to the sudden introduction of predators in its once-safe island home.įor millions of years before human explorers set foot on Mauritius, the island had no large, land-based predators. The dodo went extinct through a fatal combination of slow evolution and fast environmental changes, according to National Geographic. Later, deforestation removed much of the dodo's woodland habitat, researchers reported in 2009 in the journal Oryx. By then, previous visitors to the island had already introduced so many predators that dodos no longer roamed the beaches and mountains. Mauritius and its neighboring islands harbored no permanent human population before the Dutch East India Company established a settlement there in the 1600s, according to the Stanford University Department of Anthropology. Mauritius is located about 700 miles (1,100 km) from Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Send us feedback about these examples.Dodos lived on the subtropical volcanic island of Mauritius, now an independent state made up of several islands in the Indian Ocean. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dodo.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2023 The dodo is the third animal Colossal is hoping to de-extinct. Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics, 31 Jan. 2023 The Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, provides the host cells for genome engineering while the Rodrigues solitaire, the dodo’s closest genetic relative, adds additional insights. 2023 The research team working on the return of the dodo is creating reference genomes of the solitaire, an extinct bird related to the dodo, and the Nicobar pigeon, which is the closest living relative to the dodo, Lamm said. Brendan McAleer, Car and Driver, 15 Aug. 2023 Following in the tread marks of the Chevrolet City Express, Nissan NV200, and Ram ProMaster City, the Ford Transit Connect goes the way of the dodo with the close of the 2023 model year. Brynn Tannehill, The New Republic, 24 Aug. 2023 Bilateral cooperation between law enforcement agencies would go the way of the dodo, making future operations almost impossible. 2023 The Southwest Conference went the way of the dodo, and the WAC no longer has a presence in the Football Bowl Subdivision. 2023 The company is moving forward with plans to revive the the dodo. Heide Brandes, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Sep. Recent Examples on the Web The Nacional, with its distinctive and celebrated flavor, seemed to be a thing of the past-the dodo bird of the chocolate world.
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