Why did the Mauritian dodo lose its ability to fly. Dodo bird: after death and before. Material remains of the species
Dodos were flightless birds the size of a goose. It is assumed that an adult bird weighed 20-25 kg (for comparison: the mass of a turkey is 12-16 kg), it reached a meter in height.
The paws of the dodo with four fingers resembled those of a turkey, the beak is very massive. Unlike penguins and ostriches, dodos could not only fly, but also swim well or run fast: there were no land predators on the islands and there was nothing to be afraid of.
As a result of centuries of evolution, the dodo and its brethren gradually lost their wings - only a few feathers remained on them, and the tail turned into a small crest.
Dodos were found in the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. They lived in forests, kept in separate pairs. They nested on the ground, laying one large white egg.
Dodos completely died out with the advent of Europeans on the Mascarene Islands - first the Portuguese, and then the Dutch.
Dodo hunting became a source of replenishment of ship supplies, rats, pigs, cats and dogs were brought to the islands, which ate the eggs of a helpless bird.
To hunt a dodo, you just had to approach him and hit him on the head with a stick. Having previously had no natural enemies, the dodo was trusting. Perhaps that is why the sailors gave him the name "dodo" - from the common Portuguese word "doudo" ("doido" - "stupid", "crazy").
Dodo(Raphinae) is an extinct subfamily of flightless birds, formerly known as didinae. Birds of this subfamily lived in the Mascarene Islands, Mauritius and Rodrigues, but became extinct as a result of hunting by humans and predation by rats and dogs introduced by humans.
Dodo belong to the order Pigeons and have two genera, the genera Pezophaps and Raphus. The first contained the Rodrigues dodo (Pezophaps solitaria) and the second the Mauritian dodo (Raphus cucullatus). These birds reached impressive sizes due to isolation on the islands.
The closest living relative of the dodo is the maned pigeon is the dodo and the Rodrigues dodo.
The maned pigeon is the closest relative of the dodo.
The Mauritius dodo (Raphus cucullatus), or dodo, lived on the island of Mauritius; the last mention of it refers to 1681, there is a drawing by the artist R. Saverey in 1628.
One of the most famous and often copied images of the dodo, created by Roulant Severey in 1626
The Rodrigues dodo (Pezophaps solitaria), or hermit dodo, lived on the island of Rodrigues, died out after 1761, possibly survived until the beginning of the 19th century.
Mauritian dodo, or dodo(Raphus cucullatus) - an extinct species, was endemic to the island of Mauritius.
The first documented mention of the dodo appeared thanks to the Dutch navigators who arrived on the island in 1598.
With the advent of man, the bird became a victim of sailors, and the last observation in nature, widely recognized by the scientific community, was recorded in 1662.
The disappearance was not immediately noticed, and for a long time many naturalists considered the dodo a mythical creature, until in the 40s of the 19th century a study was made of the surviving remains of individuals brought to Europe at the beginning of the 17th century. At the same time, the relationship of dodos with pigeons was first indicated.
A large number of bird remains have been collected on the island of Mauritius, mainly from the area of the marsh Mar aux Saunges.
The extinction of this species in less than a century since its discovery drew the attention of the scientific community to the previously unknown problem of human involvement in the extinction of animals.
Rodrigues Dodo, or hermit dodo(Pezophaps solitaria) is an extinct flightless bird of the pigeon family, endemic to the island of Rodrigues, located east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Its closest relative was the Mauritius dodo (both species formed the subfamily of the dodo).
The size of a swan, the Rodrigues dodo had pronounced sexual dimorphism. Males were much larger than females and reached up to 90 cm in length and 28 kg in weight. Females reached up to 70 cm in length and 17 kilograms in weight. The plumage of males was gray and brown, while that of females was pale.
The Rodrigues dodo is the only extinct bird that astronomers named a constellation after. It was called Turdus Solitarius, and later - Lone Thrush.
The appearance of the dodo is known only from images and written sources of the 17th century. Since those single sketches that were copied from living specimens and have survived to this day differ from each other, the exact lifetime appearance of the bird remains unknown for certain.
Similarly, little can be said with certainty about her habits. The remains show that the Mauritian dodo was about 1 meter tall and could have weighed 10-18 kg.
The bird depicted in the paintings had a brownish-gray plumage, yellow legs, a small tuft of tail feathers and a gray, unfeathered head with a black, yellow or green beak.
The main habitat of the dodo was probably the forests in the drier, coastal regions of the island. It is believed that the Mauritian dodo lost its ability to fly due to the presence of a large number of food sources (which are believed to have included fallen fruit) and the absence of dangerous predators on the island.
Ornithologists of the first half of the 19th century attributed the dodo to small ostriches, shepherds, and albatrosses, and even considered it a kind of vulture!
So in 1835, Henri Blainville, examining a cast of the skull obtained from the Oxford Museum, concluded that the bird was related to ... kites!
In 1842, Danish zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhart suggested that dodos were ground pigeons based on research on a skull he discovered in the royal collection in Copenhagen. Initially, this opinion was considered ridiculous by the scientist's colleagues, but in 1848 he was supported by Hugh Strickland and Alexander Melville, who published the monograph "Dodo and its relatives" (TheDodoandItsKindred).
After Melville dissected the head and paw of a specimen kept in the Museum of Natural History at Oxford University and compared them with the remains of the extinct Rodrigues dodo, scientists found that both species are closely related. Strickland established that although these birds were not identical, they had many common features in the structure of the bones of the legs, characteristic only of pigeons.
The Mauritius dodo was similar to pigeons in many anatomical ways. This species differed from other members of the family mainly in underdeveloped wings, as well as in a much larger beak relative to the rest of the skull.
During the 19th century, several species were assigned to the same genus with the dodo, including the Rodrigues hermit dodo and the Réunion dodo as Didus solitarius and Raphus solitarius, respectively.
Large bones found on Rodrigues Island (now found to be those of a male hermit dodo) led E. D. Bartlett to the existence of a larger new species, which he named Didus nazarenus (1851). Previously, it was invented by I. Gmelin (1788) for the so-called. "Nazareth bird" - partly mythical description of the dodo, which was published in 1651 by François Coche. It is now recognized as a synonym for Pezophaps solitaria. Rough sketches of a red Mauritian shepherd have also been erroneously assigned to new dodo species: Didus broeckii (Schlegel, 1848) and Didus herberti (Schlegel, 1854).
Until 1995, the so-called white, or Reunion, or Bourbon dodo (Raphus borbonicus) was considered the closest extinct relative of the dodo. Only relatively recently it was established that all his descriptions and images were misinterpreted, and the discovered remains belong to an extinct representative of the ibis family. It was eventually given the name Threskiornis solitarius.
Initially, the dodo and the hermit dodo from Rodrigues Island were assigned to different families (Raphidae and Pezophapidae, respectively), as it was believed that they appeared independently of each other. Then, over the years, they were united in the dodo family (formerly Dididae), since their exact relationship with other pigeons remained in question.
However, a DNA analysis made in 2002 confirmed the relationship of both birds and their belonging to the pigeon family. The same genetic study found that the closest modern relative of dodos is the maned pigeon.
The remains of another large, slightly smaller than the dodo and the Rodrigues dodo, the flightless pigeon Natunaornis gigoura were found on the island of Viti Levu (Fiji) and described in 2001. It is believed that he is also related to crowned pigeons.
A genetic study in 2002 showed that the separation of the "pedigrees" of the Rodrigues and Mauritian dodos occurred in the region of the border of the Paleogene and Neogene about 23 million years ago.
The Mascarene Islands (Mauritius, Reunion and Rodrigues) are of volcanic origin with an age of no more than 10 million years. Thus, the common ancestors of these birds must have retained the ability to fly for a long time after separation.
The absence of herbivorous mammals in Mauritius, which could compete with food, allowed dodos to reach very large sizes. At the same time, birds were not threatened by predators, which led to the loss of the ability to fly.
Apparently, the earliest documented name for the dodo is the Dutch word walghvogel, which is mentioned in the journal of Vice Admiral Wiebrand van Warwijk, who visited Mauritius during the Second Dutch Expedition to Indonesia in 1598.
The English word wallowbirdes, which can literally be translated as "tasteless birds", is a tracing-paper from the Dutch counterpart walghvogel; the word wallow is dialectal and cognate with Middle Dutch walghe meaning "tasteless", "insipid" and "nauseous".
Another report from the same expedition, written by Heindrik Dirks Yolinka (perhaps this is the very first mention of the dodo), says that the Portuguese who had previously visited Mauritius called those birds "penguins". However, they used the word fotilicaios to designate the only spectacled penguins then known, and what the Dutchman mentioned seems to be derived from the Portuguese pinion (“clipped wing”), obviously indicating the small size of those of dodos.
The crew of the Dutch ship "Gelderland" in 1602 called them the word dronte (meaning "swollen", "bloated"). From it came the modern name used in the Scandinavian and Slavic languages (including Russian). This crew also called them griff-eendt and kermisgans, in reference to the poultry being fattened for the Kermesse patron feast in Amsterdam, which was held the day after the sailors anchored off the coast of Mauritius.
The origin of the word "dodo" is unclear. Some researchers elevate it to the Dutch “dodoor” (“lazy”), others to “dod-aars” meaning “fat-assed” or “knobby-assed”, with which the sailors probably wanted to emphasize such a feature as a tuft of feathers in the tail of a bird (Strickland also mentions its slang meaning with the Russian analogue "salaga").
The first entry of the word "dod-aars" is found in 1602 in the ship's logbook of Captain Willem van West-Sahnen.
The English traveler Thomas Herbert first used the word "dodo" in print in his 1634 travel essay, where he claimed it was used by the Portuguese who visited Mauritius in 1507.
Emmanuel Altham used the word in a letter from 1628, in which he also declared his Portuguese origin. As far as is known, no surviving Portuguese source mentioned this bird. However, some authors still claim that the word "dodo" comes from the Portuguese "doudo" (currently "doido"), which means "fool" or "crazy". It has also been suggested that "dodo" was an onomatopoeia of a bird's voice, imitating the two-note sound made by doves and similar to "doo-doo".
The Latin adjective "cucullatus" was first applied to the Mauritian dodo in 1635 by Juan Eusebio Niremberg, who gave the bird the name "Cygnus cucullatus" ("Cowled Swan"), based on the image of a dodo made by Charles Clusius in 1605.
A hundred years later, in a classic 18th-century work entitled The System of Nature, Carl Linnaeus used the word "cucullatus" as the species name for the dodo, but in combination with "Struthio" ("ostrich").
In 1760, Mathurin-Jacques Brisson introduced the currently used genus name "Raphus" by adding the above adjective to it.
In 1766, Carl Linnaeus introduced another scientific name - "Didus ineptus" ("stupid dodo"), which became synonymous with the earlier name according to the principle of priority in zoological nomenclature.
Mansur's 1628 painting: "Dodo among the Indian Birds"
Since there are no complete copies of the dodo, it is difficult to determine such features of appearance as the nature and color of the plumage. Thus, drawings and written evidence of encounters with Mauritian dodos in the period between the first documentary evidence and disappearance (1598–1662) became the most important sources for describing their appearance.
According to most images, the dodo had a gray or brownish plumage with lighter flight feathers and a tuft of curly light feathers in the lumbar region.
The head was gray and bald, the beak was green, black or yellow, and the legs were yellowish with black claws.
The remains of birds brought to Europe in the 17th century show that they were very large, about 1 meter in height, and could weigh up to 23 kg.
Increased body weights are characteristic of birds kept in captivity; the mass of individuals in the wild was estimated in the range of 10-21 kg.
A later estimate gives a minimum average weight of an adult bird of 10 kg, but this number has been questioned by a number of researchers. It is assumed that body weight depended on the season: in the warm and humid period of the year, individuals became obese, in the dry and hot period, the opposite was true.
This bird was characterized by sexual dimorphism: males were larger than females and had proportionately longer beaks. The latter reached 23 cm in length and had a hook at the end.
Most of the contemporary descriptions of dodos were found in the logbooks of the ships of the Dutch East India Company that docked off the coast of Mauritius during the colonial period of the Dutch Empire. Few of these reports can be considered reliable, since some of them were probably based on earlier ones, and none of them were made by a naturalist.
“... Blue parrots were very numerous here, as were other birds, among which there was a species that was very noticeable due to its large size - larger than our swans, with a huge head, only half covered with skin, and as if dressed in a hood. These birds did not have wings, and in their place 3 or 4 dark feathers stuck out. The tail consisted of several soft concave ash-colored feathers. We called them Walghvögel for the reason that the longer and more often they were cooked, the less soft and more and more tasteless they became. Nevertheless, their belly and brisket tasted good and were easily chewed ... "
One of the most detailed descriptions of the bird was made by the English traveler Thomas Herbert in his book A Relation of some yeares' Travaile, begunne Anno 1626, into Africa and the greater Asia. , 1634):
Drawing made by Thomas Herbert in 1634
The French traveler Francois Coche (François Cauche), in a report published in 1651 on his journey, which included a two-week stay in Mauritius (from July 15, 638), left the only description of the egg and the voice of a bird that has come down to us.
“….. Only here and on the island of Digarrois (Rodrigues, probably meaning the dodo hermit) is born a dodo bird, which in shape and rarity can compete with the Arabian phoenix: its body is round and heavy, and it weighs less than fifty pounds . It is considered more curiosity than food; from them even greasy stomachs can get sick, and for the tender it is an insult, but not food.
From her appearance one can see the despondency caused by the injustice of nature, which created such a huge body, complemented by wings so small and helpless that they serve only to prove that it is a bird.
Half of her head is naked and as if covered with a thin veil, the beak is bent down and in the middle of it are the nostrils, from them to the tip it is light green mixed with a pale yellow tint; her eyes are small and round and rowling like diamonds (?); her attire consists of down feathers, on the tail there are three feathers, short and disproportionate. Her legs match her body, her claws are sharp. It has a strong appetite and is gluttonous. Able to digest stones and iron, whose description is better perceived from her image ... ".
“... I saw birds in Mauritius larger than a swan, without feathers on the body, which is covered with black fluff; the back is rounded, the rump is decorated with curly feathers, the number of which increases with age. Instead of wings, they have the same feathers as the previous ones: black and curved. They do not have tongues, the beak is large and slightly bent down; the legs are long, scaly, with only three toes on each paw. He has a cry like a gosling, but this does not at all mean a pleasant taste, like the flamingos and ducks that we just talked about. In the clutch they have one egg, white, the size of a 1 sous roll, a stone the size of a chicken egg is applied to it. They lay on the grass they gather, and build their nests in the forest; if you kill the chick, you can find a gray stone in her belly. We call them "Nazareth birds". Their fat is a wonderful remedy for relief in the muscles and nerves ... "
In general, the message of François Coche raises some doubts, since, in addition to everything, it says that the "Nazareth bird" has three toes and no tongue, which does not correspond at all to the anatomy of the Mauritian dodos. This led to the erroneous conclusion that the traveler described another related species, which was later given the name "Didus nazarenus". However, most likely, he confused his information with data on the then little-studied cassowaries, besides, there are other contradictory statements in his notes.
As for the origin of the concept of "Nazareth bird", the Russian scientist Joseph Hamel in 1848 explained it by saying that this Frenchman, having heard the translation of the original name of the bird "walghvogel" ("Oiseaudenausée" - "nauseous bird"), the word "nausée" (nausea ) correlated with the geographical point "Nazaret", indicated on the maps of those years near Mauritius.
The mention of a "young ostrich" taken on board a ship in 1617 is the only report of a possible young dodo.
A drawing of a dodo head by Cornelis Saftleven in 1638 is the last original depiction of the bird.
About twenty images of dodos of the 17th century are known, copied from living representatives or stuffed.
Drawings by different artists have noticeable differences in details, such as beak coloration, tail feather shape, and overall coloration. Some experts, such as Anton Cornelius Audemans and Masauji Hachisuka, put forward a number of versions that the paintings could depict individuals of different sex, age, or in different periods of the year.
Finally, speculation has been made about different types However, none of these theories have been confirmed. To date, on the basis of the drawings, it is impossible to say for certain how much they generally reflected reality.
British palaeontologist and dodo specialist Julian Hume argues that the nostrils of living dodos must have been slit-like, as shown in the sketches from the Gelderland, as well as in the paintings of Cornelis Suftleven, Mansour and the work of an unknown artist from the collection of the Crocker Art Museum. According to Hume, the wide-open nostrils often seen in paintings indicate that the subjects were stuffed rather than live birds.
A logbook from the Dutch ship Gelderland (1601-1603), discovered in the archives in the 1860s, contains the only sketches authentically created in Mauritius from living or recently killed individuals. They were drawn by two artists, one of whom, more professional, could be called Joris Joostensz Laerle. On the basis of what material, live birds or stuffed animals, subsequent images were created, it is not possible to find out today, which harms their reliability.
The classic image of the dodo is of a very fat and clumsy bird, but this view is probably exaggerated. The generally accepted opinion of scientists is that many of the old European images were obtained from birds overfed in captivity or roughly stuffed stuffed.
The Dutch painter Roelant Savery was the most prolific and influential painter of the dodos. He painted at least ten paintings.
His famous 1626 work, now known as Edwards' Dodo (now in the collection of the Natural History Museum, London). It has become a typical image of the dodo and served as the primary source for many others, despite the fact that it shows an overly fat bird.
Almost nothing is known about the habits of the dodo due to the scarcity of information. Studies of the bones of the hind limbs show that the bird could run quite fast. Since the Mauritian dodo was a flightless bird and there were no predatory mammals or other enemies on the island, it probably nested on the ground.
The habitat preferences of the dodo are unknown, but old reports state that these birds inhabited forests in the drier coastal areas in the south and west of Mauritius. This opinion is supported by the fact that the marsh Mar-aux-Songs, in which most of the remains of dodos are found, is located near the sea, in the southeastern part of the island. Such a limited range could have made a significant contribution to the extinction of the species.
On a 1601 map from the logbook of the ship Gelderland, off the coast of Mauritius, a small island is visible where dodos were caught. Julian Hume suggested that this island was in Tamarin Bay, on the west coast of Mauritius. The remains of birds found in the caves of mountainous areas prove that birds were also found on the hills.
Sketch of three dodos from the Crocker Museum of Art, made by Savery in 1626
“….These burgomasters are majestic and proud. They stood before us, resolute and determined, their beaks wide open. Lively and bold when walking, they could hardly take a step to meet us. Their weapon was a beak, with which they could bite cruelly; they ate fruit; they did not have good plumage, but they had enough fat in excess. Many of them, to our common joy, were brought on board ... ".
In addition to fallen fruit, the dodo probably fed on nuts, seeds, bulbs, and roots. The Dutch zoologist Anton Cornelius Oudemans suggested that since Mauritius has dry and rainy seasons, the dodo apparently fattened up at the end of the wet season by eating ripe fruits in order to survive the dry season when food was scarce. Contemporaries described the “greedy” appetite of the bird.
Some pioneers considered dodo meat tasteless and preferred to eat parrots or pigeons, others described it as tough but good. Some hunted dodos only for the stomachs, which were considered the tastiest part of the bird. Dodos were very easy to catch, but hunters had to beware of their powerful beaks.
They became interested in dodos and began to export living individuals to Europe and the East.
The number of birds that made it to their destinations in one piece is unknown, and unclear, as they correlate with paintings from those years and a number of exhibits in European museums.
The description of a dodo that Hamon Lestrange saw in London in 1638 is the only mention that directly refers to a living specimen in Europe.
In 1626, Adrian van de Venne drew a dodo he claimed to have seen in Amsterdam, but did not say if he was alive. Two living specimens were seen by Peter Mundy in Surat between 1628 and 1634.
Drawing of a specimen that was in the Prague collection of Emperor Rudolf II. The author of the drawing is Jacob Hufnagel
Drawing of a dodo by Adrian van de Venne in 1626
The presence of solid stuffed dodos indicates that the birds were brought to Europe alive and later died there; it is unlikely that there were taxidermists on board the ships that came to Mauritius, and alcohol has not yet been used to preserve biological exhibits.
Most of the tropical exhibits have been preserved in the form of dried heads and legs. Based on a combination of contemporary stories, paintings and stuffed animals, Julian Hume concluded that at least eleven of the exported dodos were delivered alive to their final destinations.
Like many other animals that developed in isolation from serious predators, dodos were not at all afraid of people. This lack of fear and inability to fly made the bird easy prey for sailors. Although anecdotal reports have described the massive slaughter of dodos to replenish ship supplies, archaeological studies have not found strong evidence of human predation.
The bones of at least two dodos have been found in caves near BaieduCap, which served as a refuge for maroons and runaway convicts in the 17th century, and were not easily accessible to dodos due to the mountainous, rugged terrain.
The number of people in Mauritius (a territory of 1860 km²) in the 17th century never exceeded 50 people, but they introduced other animals, including dogs, pigs, cats, rats and crab-eating monkeys, which ravaged dodo nests and competed for limited food resources.
At the same time, people destroyed the dodo's forest habitat. The impact on the abundance of the species from introduced pigs and macaques is currently considered to be more significant and significant than from hunting. The rats may not have been such a big threat to the nests, as the dodos are used to dealing with native ground crabs.
It is assumed that by the time people arrived in Mauritius, the dodo was already rare or had a limited range, since it would hardly have died out so quickly if it occupied all the remote areas of the island.
There is controversy around the date of the extinction of the dodo. The last widely accepted report of dodo sightings is a report from sailor Volkert Everts on the shipwrecked Dutch ship Arnhem dated 1662. He described birds caught on a small island near Mauritius (now thought to be Îled'Ambre Island):
“... These animals, when we approached, froze, looking at us, and calmly remained in place, as if they did not know if they had wings to fly away, or legs to run away, and allowing us to approach them as close as we wanted. Among these birds were those which in India are called Dod-aersen (this is a species of very large geese); these birds do not know how to fly, instead of wings they just have small processes, but they can run very fast. We drove them all into one place so that we could catch them with our hands, and when we grabbed one of them by the leg, she made such a noise that all the others immediately ran to her rescue and, as a result, they themselves were also caught ... "
The last reported sighting of the dodo was recorded in the hunting records of the governor of Mauritius, Isaac Johannes Lamotius, in 1688, giving a new approximate date for the disappearance of the dodo - 1693.
Although the dodo's rarity was reported as early as the 17th century, its extinction was not recognized until the 19th century. Partly for religious reasons, since extinction was considered impossible (until Georges Cuvier proved the opposite), and partly because many scientists doubted that dodos ever existed. In general, he seemed too strange a creature, so many believed that he was a myth. In addition, the possibility was taken into account that dodos could have survived on other, yet unexplored islands of the Indian Ocean, despite the fact that vast territories of both Madagascar and mainland Africa remained poorly studied. For the first time this bird as an example of extinction due to human activity was cited in 1833 by the British magazine The Penny Magazine.
The only surviving remains of dodos from among the individuals brought to Europe in the 17th century are:
- dried head and paw in Oxford University Museum of Natural History;
- a paw kept in the British Museum, now lost;
- a skull in the Copenhagen Zoological Museum;
- upper jaw and leg bones in the National Museum of Prague.
Skeleton compiled by Richard Owen from bones found in the Mar-aux-Songes swamp
26 museums around the world have significant collections of dodo biological materials, almost all of which are found in Mar-aux-Songes. The London Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, the Senckenberg Museum, the Darwin Museum in Moscow, and a number of others have almost complete skeletons made up of individual bones.
The skeleton in the Darwin Museum was previously in the collection of a Russian horse breeder, deputy chairman of the Bureau of the Ornithology Department of the Imperial Russian Society for the Acclimatization of Animals and Plants and a full member of the Russian Ornithological Committee A. S. Khomyakov, nationalized in 1920.
Imaginary "white dodo" from the island of Réunion (or the Réunion dodo hermit) is now considered an erroneous guess, based on contemporary reports of the Réunion ibis and on the 17th-century depictions of dodo-like white birds made in the 17th century by Peter Witos and Peter Holstein.
The confusion began when the Dutch captain Bontecou, who visited Réunion around 1619, mentioned in his journal a heavy, flightless bird called dod-eersen, although he did not write anything about its coloration.
When this journal was published in 1646, it was accompanied by a copy of Savery's sketch from the Crocker Art Gallery. The white, dense and flightless bird was first mentioned as part of the Réunion fauna by Senior Officer Tatton in 1625. Single mentions were subsequently made by the French traveler Dubois and other contemporary authors.
In 1848, Baron Michel-Edmond de Sély-Longchamp gave these birds the Latin name Raphus solitarius, because he believed that those reports referred to a new species of dodo. When naturalists of the 19th century discovered images of white dodos dating back to the 17th century, it was concluded that this particular species was depicted on them. Anton Cornelius Audemans suggested that the reason for the discrepancy between the drawings and the old descriptions lies in sexual dimorphism (the paintings allegedly depicted females). Some authors believed that the described birds belonged to a species similar to the Rodrigues hermit dodo. It came to hypotheses that white specimens of both the dodo and the hermit dodo lived on Reunion Island.
White dodo. Drawing by Peter Holstein. Mid 17th century
17th century illustration sold at Christie's auction
In 2009, a previously unpublished 17th-century Dutch illustration of a white-and-grey dodo was auctioned by Christie's. It was planned to fetch £6,000 for her, but in the end she left for £44,450. Whether this illustration was drawn from a stuffed animal or from earlier images remains unknown.
The unusual appearance of the dodo and its importance as one of the most famous extinct animals has repeatedly attracted writers and figures of popular culture.
So in English included the expression "dead as a Dodo" (dead like a dodo), which is used to refer to something outdated, as well as the word "dodoism" (something extremely conservative and reactionary).
Similarly, the idiom "togothewayoftheDodo" (to go the way of the dodo) has the following meanings: "to die" or "become obsolete", "to go out of common use or practice", or "become part of the past".
Alice and Dodo. Illustration by J. Tenniel for Lewis Carroll's fairy tale "Alice in Wonderland"
In 1865, at the same time that George Clark began to publish reports of excavations of dodo remains, the bird, whose reality had just been proven, appeared as a character in Lewis Carroll's fairy tale Alice in Wonderland. It is believed that the author inserted Dodo into the book, identifying himself with him and taking this name as a personal pseudonym due to a stammer, which caused him to involuntarily pronounce his real name as "Do-Do-Dodgson." The popularity of the book made the dodo a well-known symbol of extinction.
Coat of arms of Mauritius
Today, the dodo is used as an emblem on many types of products, especially in Mauritius. The dodo is represented on the coat of arms of this country as a shield holder. In addition, the image of his head appears on the watermarks of Mauritian rupee banknotes of all denominations.
Many conservation organizations, such as the Durrell Wildlife Foundation and Durrell Wildlife Park, use the image of the dodo to draw attention to the protection of endangered species.
The dodo has become a symbol of the destruction of species as a result of careless or barbaric intrusion from the outside into the existing ecosystem.
A.A. Kazdym
List of used literature
Akimushkin I.I. "Dead like a dodo" // Animal World: Birds. Fish, amphibians and reptiles. Moscow: Thought, 1995
Galushin V.M., Drozdov N.N., Ilyichev V.D., Konstantinov V.M., Kurochkin E.N., Polozov S.A., Potapov R.L., Flint V.E., Fomin V.E. . Fauna of the World: Birds: Directory M.: Agropromizdat, 1991
Vinokurov A.A. Rare and endangered animals. Birds / edited by academician V.E. Sokolov. M .: "Higher School", 1992.
Hume J.P. Check A.S. The white dodo of Réunion Island: unraveling a scientific and historical myth // Archives of natural history. Vol. 31, No. 1, 2004
Dodo skeleton find in Mauritius
Dodo Bird: After Death
Dodos, or dodos, are representatives of the bird family of the pigeon-like order, lived on Earth about two centuries ago. The first scientific description of these birds appeared at the end of the 16th century. The first acquaintance of Europeans with the dodo bird belongs to the same time.
The first records of European travelers with the description of the mysterious flightless bird contained in them were made by the Dutch admiral Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck, who visited the island of Mauritius in 1601. It was then that the scientific world of Europe learned about the existence of a hitherto unknown representative of birds. This is how van Neck described these birds: “... more than our swans, with a huge head, half covered with feathers, as if with a hood. This bird has no wings. The tail consists of several soft, ash-colored feathers bent inward ... "
Of course, the captain was wrong in thinking that the dodo did not have wings. In fact, they had small, poorly developed wings. Birds often used them in duels with rivals. Here is a description of the behavior of birds left by another European traveler, Francois Lega: “... they just fight with their wings and wave them, calling each other. These strokes are fast and follow one after another twenty or thirty times within 4 - 5 minutes; the movements of the wings create a noise reminiscent of the sound made by the kestrel. It can be heard at a distance of more than 200 m. The skeleton of the wing is more rigid in the outer part and forms a small round growth under the feathers of the bird, resembling a musket bullet, which, together with the beak, is the main means of protection ... "
DodoFor the rest, however, van Neck was right. Judging by the paleontological finds, these were rather large birds. The average body weight of dodos was 25 kg, and the height reached 1 m.
The dodo's beak looked like an eagle's. That is why scientists have suggested that dodos were predators that fed on carrion, like eagles or vultures. However, this theory soon had to be refuted. Thanks to paleontological findings and a few descriptions, naturalists came to the conclusion that dodos were herbivorous and fed on the fruits of the palm tree, buds and leaves of trees and shrubs growing on the islands.
Dodos built nests to incubate their chicks. They were built on the ground and insulated with palm leaves and branches. The female dodo laid one egg, which both parents incubated in turn for about 30 days. At the same time, both the male and the female took care that strangers, other dodos or predators, did not approach the nest.
According to modern scientists, the mysterious dodo birds became extinct due to the settlement of the islands - the habitats of birds - by people. People have been known to bring their pets with them. Dodos could not survive in the neighborhood with pigs, dogs and rats.
In addition to the dodo, on the Mascarene Islands, due to human fault, such species of birds as the Dutch dove, the Reunion gray-brown parrot, the Mauritius shepherd and the Mauritian blue-gray parrot, the minerva owl, and also the corncrake became extinct.
In the western part of the Indian Ocean is the island of Mauritius, which has become famous for its unique wildlife. A third of its territory is occupied by tropical forests, which are an ideal environment for animal life. Despite favorable conditions, some of their species that previously inhabited the island became extinct. Among them is the Mauritius dodo, a flightless bird belonging to the family of the same name.
Little is known about its existence and lifestyle. We know that the dodo lived in places with a lot of fruit trees. The bird built its nests on the ground, where it hatched offspring. At the same time, the female laid only one egg, and raised only one chick.
Information has reached our days that the bird nested in the southwestern part of the island, which was distinguished by a drier climate. Where the bird has such a commitment is not known for certain. But the fact that this was exactly the case is also confirmed by the fact that the bird was caught by the sailors of the Gelderland, who landed on the island in 1601.
It was a fairly large bird, up to a meter long and weighing 20 kilograms. There were no predators on the island, so the flightless Dodo had no enemies there. We can judge the appearance of the bird only by the surviving pictures, and the descriptions that have survived to this day. The most interesting thing is that they are all different from each other, and do not allow you to get an accurate idea of the dodo. We can only compile a rough description of the bird, based on surviving documents.
And so what do we know?
The bird was quite large. The weight of an adult individual reached 18 kilograms. The dodo could not fly, but he did not need it, because he had no enemies on the island. The bird had a powerful hooked beak. Its length was 23 centimeters. Thanks to the fossil remains found, information was obtained about the plumage of the bird. Most likely, her body was covered with down.
Here is what eyewitnesses write about this bird.
The dodo's body was round and fat. She was not suitable for food, due to the low taste of her meat. Appearance was nondescript. The presence of poorly developed wings is also noted. The head ended in a powerful, downward-curved beak, yellow in color. There was no plumage, as such. Instead, there were three small feathers. The rest of the body, including the head, was covered with down. Thin and short legs did not match her huge body. Most likely, the fault of the disproportionate physique of the dodo was its gluttony.
The nature of the birds was quite severe. Due to their large weight, they could not move quickly, and used their sharp beaks as weapons. They ate only fruits. A thick layer of subcutaneous fat saved them from the cold. With the onset of the rainy season, the birds experienced a lack of food, and lived mainly on stored fat.
At one time, man made enough efforts to wipe out many species of animals from the face of the Earth. Perhaps he did it unintentionally, but the result of this has not changed. How many animals have been included in the Black Book since the 16th century? Dozens, if not hundreds.
Let me remind you that along with the International Red Book, which includes animals that are on the verge of extinction and need enhanced protection, there is a Black Book that includes animals that existed on Earth not so long ago and disappeared forever thanks to man. We have already written about some of this list - these are Steller's cow and thylacine.
The turn of dodos has come - funny flightless birds, similar to large turkeys with a massive beak and powerful paws.
In the dodo family, 3 species were distinguished, the most famous of which was the Mauritian dodo (lat. Raphus cucullatus), which received the funny name “do-do”. The remaining two species, the Réunion or Bourbon dodo (lat. Raphus solitarius) and the hermit dodo (lat. Pezophaps solitaria), were less numerous than the first.
All three species became extinct during the 17th and 18th centuries. The Mauritian dodo that lived on the island of Mauritius (1681) was the very first of them to disappear. Behind him, in the middle of the 18th century, the Bourbon dodo (presumably 1750), which lived on the island of Reunion, disappeared, and at the beginning of the 19th century, the third species also disappeared - the inhabitant of the island of Rodrigues.
Photo by Via Tsuji The appearance of dodos can only be judged by the descriptions and drawings that have remained since those times. Fortunately, thanks to the extraordinary interest in this bird, delivered by several living specimens to Europe, many painters considered it their duty to capture this wonderful miracle. Unfortunately, only 14 portraits of these dodos have survived to this day. One of which was discovered quite by accident in 1955 at the St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) Institute of Oriental Studies.
The beak is the most remarkable body part in the appearance of dodos. It could reach a length of 20 centimeters, and the tip of its beak was slightly bent down, which gave the dodo a slightly predatory look. They were slightly larger than turkeys. Quite well-fed, and from this they looked awkward.
They lost their wings during a long evolution, and in their place only rudiments remained in the form of several elongated feathers. The tail was also missing. Unlike some flightless birds, such as ostriches or cassowaries, they did not know how to run fast.
Photo by Stanislav Krejcik So the dodos lived in their calm world until the most bloodthirsty predator of all times and peoples appeared on their islands - man.
The first to land on the Mascarene Islands were the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch. Missing meat for long months of wandering around the sea, the sailors mercilessly killed these birds and filled their holds with their carcasses to capacity. Killing the do-do was easy. Never encountering predators, these birds trustingly and fearlessly approached strangers. They paid for their gullibility with their lives. The birds could not escape them, because they did not know how to fly, but ran extremely slowly and clumsily. Therefore, dodos became very easy and tasty prey.
In 1598, the Dutch established a penal colony on these islands. After that, pigs, dogs, cats and rats and other living creatures were brought here, which helped to destroy these birds. The last straw was deforestation for sugar and tea plantations.
Dodos were vegetarians. They fed on leaves, fruits and seeds of plants. They made their nests in the bushes. The female laid only 1 egg.
All that is now left of this bird is a complete femur and 4 paw bones, fragments of skulls, beaks, vertebrae and toes. The Mauritian dodo got its name “do-do” from the lips of the Dutch, which in their language means “stupid”, “simple”.
Knowing the sad history of this bird, it becomes clear why the Jersey Wildlife Trust chose the dodo as their emblem. In addition, the image of this bird can be seen on the state emblem of Mauritius.
The dodo is a flightless extinct bird that lived on the island of Mauritius. The first mention of this bird arose thanks to sailors from Holland who visited the island at the end of the 16th century. More detailed data on the bird were obtained in the 17th century. Some naturalists have long considered the dodo a mythical creature, but later it turned out that this bird really existed.
Appearance
The dodo, known as the dodo bird, was quite large. Adult individuals reached a weight of 20–25 kg, and their height was approximately 1 m.
Other Features:
- swollen body and small wings, indicating the impossibility of flight;
- strong short legs;
- paws with 4 fingers;
- short tail of several feathers.
These birds were slow and moved on the ground. Outwardly, the feathered one somewhat resembled a turkey, but there was no crest on its head.
The main characteristic is the hooked beak and the absence of plumage near the eyes. For some time, scientists believed that dodos are relatives of albatrosses due to the similarity of their beaks, but this opinion has not been confirmed. Other zoologists have spoken of belonging to birds of prey, including vultures, which also have no feathered skin on their heads.
It is worth noting that Mauritius dodo beak length is approximately 20 cm, and its end is curved down. The body color is fawn or ash gray. The feathers on the thighs are black, while those on the chest and wings are whitish. In fact, the wings were only their beginnings.
Reproduction and nutrition
According to modern scientists, dodos created nests from palm branches and leaves, as well as earth, after which one large egg was laid here. Incubation for 7 weeks the male and female alternated. This process, together with feeding the chick, lasted several months.
In such a crucial period, dodos did not let anyone near the nest. It is worth noting that other birds were driven away by a dodo of the same sex. For example, if another female approached the nest, then the male sitting on the nest began to flap its wings and make loud sounds, calling on its female.
The dodo diet was based on mature palm fruits, leaves and buds. Scientists were able to prove exactly this type of nutrition from the stones found in the stomach of birds. These pebbles performed the function of grinding food.
Remains of the species and evidence of its existence
On the territory of Mauritius, where the dodo lived, there were no large mammals and predators, which is why the bird became trusting and very peaceful. When people began to arrive on the islands, they exterminated the dodos. In addition, pigs, goats and dogs were brought here. These mammals ate bushes where dodo nests were located, crushed their eggs, and destroyed nestlings and adult birds.
After the final extermination, it was difficult for scientists to prove that the dodo really existed. One of the specialists managed to find several massive bones on the islands. A little later, large-scale excavations were carried out in the same place. The last study was conducted in 2006. It was then that paleontologists from Holland found in Mauritius dodo skeleton remains:
- beak;
- wings;
- paws;
- spine;
- element of the femur.
In general, the skeleton of a bird is considered a very valuable scientific find, but finding its parts is much easier than a surviving egg. To this day, it has survived only in one copy. Its value exceeds the value of a Madagascar epiornis egg, that is, the largest bird that existed in ancient times.
Dodo is of great interest by scientists from all over the world. This explains the numerous excavations and studies that are carried out today in the territory of Mauritius. Moreover, some experts are interested in restoring the species through genetic engineering.
