The dodo is one of the most famous extinct animals. However, little is known about the dodo itself. Humans drove the bird into extinction in the late 1600s, and little thought was given to preserving the remnants of the bird at the time. Scientists now are using 3D imaging of the only known complete dodo skeleton to find out more about the bird, creating lifelike depictions of how the bird would have walked.
There is only one known complete dodo skeleton still in existence. In the late 1800s, about 200 years after the dodo's extinction, a naturalist named Etienne Thirioux found a complete dodo skeleton on Mauritius Island. That is the skeleton which researchers were able to study.
"The 3-D laser surface scans we made of the fragile Thirioux dodo skeletons enable us to reconstruct how the dodo walked, moved and lived to a level of detail that has never been possible before. There are so many outstanding questions about the dodo bird that we can answer with this new knowledge," said Leon Claessens, lead researcher on this study.
The research team also scanned a second composite dodo skeleton which Thirioux put together. Claessens found that much of the dodo had previously gone undescribed.
The dodo was the largest known member of the pigeon family, standing at around 3 feet tall. It was a flightless bird, native to Mauritius Island in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch discovered the island in 1598. It was less than a hundred years after that before the dodo went extinct. The dodo laid its eggs on the ground, which made it very easy for the dogs and pigs introduced by the Dutch to kill them off.
Humans at the time were careless with the remaining fragments of dodos left after their extinction, leaving behind very little: just three or four paintings, and some bone fragments. In his book A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson describes how, in 1755, a museum director in Oxford in possession of the only stuffed Dodo bird in existence said that the bird was becoming "musty," and set it on fire. Only the head and part of one limb of that bird was saved when an employee passed by and rescued the bird from the fire.
This 3D imaging is an incredible case of scientists taking a tiny piece of evidence and being able to learn from it. In these scans, the dodo lives again, to some extent.
