Dodo myths

 Dodo myths

Hume said there’s very little known about the dodo and lots of myths surround the creature. Even the origin of its name is a mystery, though he thinks it stems from the sound of the call the bird was said to have made — a low-pitched pigeon-like coo.

Millions of years ago, the dodo’s ancestors lived in Southeast Asia, and when sea levels were low, it island-hopped its way to Mauritius, where it became isolated without predators once sea levels rose.

“Flight is very (energetically) expensive. Why bother maintaining it if you don’t need it? All the fruit and food is on the ground, and when you’ve become flightless, you can become big. That’s what the dodo did, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger,” Hume said.

According to a digital 3D model of the bird Hume developed based on a skeleton from the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa, the dodo once stood around 70 centimeters (2.3 feet) tall and weighed about 15 to 18 kilograms (33 to 39 pounds).

The model revealed the dodo was also likely more agile than the illustrations that depict it as a fat, ungainly bird might suggest.

We have the dodo to thank for introducing the idea of extinction to the world — a sad achievement still felt in the phrase as “dead as a dodo.”

Back in the 1600s, before the first dinosaur fossils were widely known, “the concept of extinction didn’t exist. Everything was God’s creation and they were here forever. The idea that something can be wiped out was just not in anybody’s vocabulary,” Hume said.