Dodo why are they extinct

The dodo had no natural enemies on Mauritius. Life was sweet for dodos until humans also discovered the Mascarenes, in the late s. Despite the fact that humans were far bigger then them, dodos were not afraid of these intruders.

Fearless and flightless, they were an easy prey. Some were killed by sailors looking for a change in diet, others by the rats, cats, pigs and monkeys the sailors brought with them. Or dodos may have gone hungry as the invaders cleared forests rich in fruits. Their extinction is likely due to complex phenomena of changing ecosystem and human behavior. Nowadays, dodo means stupid or slow. But how did this extinct animal get its strange name? It may go back to early 17th century, developing from the Portuguese word 'doudo', or 'simpleton', probably because the bird had no fear of man and was easily killed.

A mythical creature? From right after their extinction and up until the 19th century, dodos were considered by most scientists as a mythical creature - as real as griffin or unicorn - as there seemed to be no conclusive evidence of their existence.

For the French that took possession of the island, the dodos seemed no more than the product of excessive imagination. Only in the early 19th century did European naturalists begin to see dodos across various museum collections. Thus the animal was recognized as a real, if extinct, creature.

Carroll frequently visited the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Pigs, dogs and rats are all animals said to have developed a taste for dodo eggs; this introduction of such animals into a foreign ecosystem, combined with humans hunting and eating them, saw the delicate balance the dodo had enjoyed for so long destroyed. The species was soon cripplingly endangered. And as a result, it faded from existence. The exact date we humans came into contact with the dodo is up for debate, Dutch sailors traveling with Jacob van Neck one of the first people to ever describe the dodo are said to have been the first humans to have seen the bird in The thing is, Portuguese sailors are also said to have seen the bird, decades before this in For example, the date the bird officially went extinct is as muddled as the date it was first discovered.

The Oxford University link above states that the dodo was extinct by , a fact that is echoed in many other sources; however, scientists plotting the last known sightings of the bird on a graph suggest that the actual date is 10 years later than this estimate. Funnily enough, despite being one of the most famous extinct animals of all time, right up there with the wooly mammoth, no one actually knows exactly what the dodo looked like.

However, the commonly accepted image of the dodo, one of an overweight, dumpling of a bird, is likely false. In reconstructions of recently found bones, it would appear that the dodo was actually a lot sleeker and agile than the artists of the past gave it credit for.

Oddly enough, the cliched image of an overweight dodo stems all the way back to when they were first spotted, though images of thinner dodos are known to exist including ones sketched by Jacob Van Neck who was one of the first to sketch them ; but these are vastly outnumbered by ones of dodos looking like they lived on a diet of nothing but sticks of butter mixed with bacon grease.

Image bank - click on the pictures for more information. Find out about the extinct and endangered animals in the Museum. Dodo Coelacanth Thylacine Blue whale Golden toad Giant panda Passenger pigeon Schaus' swallowtail Go to the Homepage to find out about hippos and the causes of extinction.

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