In fact, the dodo is thought to have once been incredibly abundant, reaching a peak population of perhaps half a million birds. Its tail, which had once been a rudder to help the bird steer and manoeuvre in flight, was reduced to a decorative curly tuft on its rump.īecoming flightless on a remote, predator-free island, where it greatly saves on energy, is an evolutionary advantage. On Mauritius, flight was no longer needed to find food, and there were no land predators to escape from, so the dodo’s wings, over countless generations, dwindled to the point that they could no longer lift the bird into the air even if it wanted to return there. And that’s exactly what happened to the dodo. This means that as soon as flying becomes a luxury rather than a necessity, it is usually dropped. Such ample resources allowed this bird, via the mechanism of evolution by natural selection, to grow significantly bigger over time.įlight is the pride and joy of the birds, but it is also an extremely expensive method of locomotion in terms of energy.
#Alive dodo full#
Its smaller ancestors almost certainly flew to Mauritius and found the island well-vegetated, devoid of mammalian predators, and full of fallen fruit and nuts for them to eat. It was the largest known pigeon to have ever lived – a classic example of island gigantism. The dodo lived only on the island of Mauritius, isolated in the vastness of the Indian Ocean. Perhaps because it was apparently so unfit for survival, its extinction seems somewhat acceptable to us, maybe even deserving.īut recently, we have started to look beyond our dated preconceived notions of this famous bird and we have learned that, like all organisms in a healthy, flourishing ecosystem, the dodo was, in fact, perfectly adapted to its environment. Many people view this big-beaked flightless fruit-eater as an unfortunate evolutionary mistake – a creature so fat, so painfully unintelligent, so useless, that it had no option but to die out. The dodo has the unenviable distinction of being a byword for something both dead and stupid.
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