It would not be exaggerating to say that it is the very. The recent discovery of a fantastic specimen of dodo DNA was the last clue needed to. The dodo is a bird that lived in the Mauritius region and was last spotted 350 years back, in 1662. It turns out it isn’t the bird we thought it was. Ma2:33pm Updated The thought of reviving the foregone dodo is no longer one for the birds.
For now, what makes the Oxford dodo especially fascinating is its past. They aren’t, and the one at Oxford University Museum of Natural History is a one-off: it is the only one to preserve soft tissues, and hence could one day be used to “de-extinct” the dodo and undo what those hungry Dutch sailors set in motion more than 400 years ago. Like many people, I had assumed that dodo specimens were two a penny. My first sighting of a dodo came earlier this year in Oxford, UK, and I very much noticed and cared. The dodo is an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. At the time, nobody much noticed or cared. It possesses similarities to an extinct bird that was known as the dodo. Like the dodo and the great auk the Tasmanian tiger is more renowned for. The little dodo is a tooth-billed pigeon that is native to Samoa. The last recorded sighting of the bird, now known as the dodo, was in 1662. Could a global icon of extinction still be alive By Brooke Jarvis. Its chicks and eggs had been predated remorselessly by invasive rats, cats, dogs and pigs, and its habitat on the once-pristine paradise of Mauritius was destroyed.
Within a century, however, it was no more. The walghvogel, meaning “tasteless bird”, was off the hook – for now. They killed and ate some, but the meat was no good, so they killed and ate some parrots and pigeons instead.
The crew put ashore and discovered an abundance of wildlife, including “a great quantity of foules twise as bigge as swans”. IN 1598, a squadron of Dutch ships landed on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Its iconic status as a symbol of species extinction is due to how rapidly this species went extinct after first being discovered by European explorers. However, my good friend Mike Williams2 reminds. Despite its eventful existence, the Oxford specimen is the only dodo with preserved soft tissues. The seventeenth century ruler had in his bizarre collection a pair of Dodos alive, not stuffed ones. It evidently was the inspiration for the title of his most well known television project, Extinct or Alive.
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