New Study Challenges The Established Belief About Dodo Birds

Researchers are redefining our understanding of the dodo, a species historically misunderstood. Widely believed to be slow and inept, new findings reveal that these birds were actually powerful and fast. Scholars from the University of Southampton, Natural History Museum, and Oxford University Museum of Natural History documented their insights in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, integrating centuries of records and correcting many past misconceptions about the dodo and its closest relative, the solitaire bird of Rodriguez Island. This is prepared by SSP.

Referred to as chubby and flightless, these 3-foot-tall, 45-pound birds (Raphus cucullatus) were driven to extinction within decades of human discovery. Researchers poured through detailed 400-year-old scientific literature and visited various collections, sorting fact from fiction. They found that popular ideas of fictional birds such as the Nazarene dodo were unfounded. Instead, a significant type specimen revealed the birds belonged to the pigeon and dove family. Primary bone specimens from Oxford University's Museum of Natural History hinted the dodo had an extremely powerful tendon analogous to modern climbing and running birds.

Researchers corrected past misunderstandings where sailors, artists, and inconsistent taxonomic systems muddled species knowledge post-extinction. Up until the late 19th century, popular myth conflated both the dodo and solitaire with mythological status, cementing the reputation of the creatures as a cautionary emblem of humanity's ecological impact.

The peripheral misconceptions about the bird evolved over centuries through the works of Victorian-era scientists, who highlighted the flightless pigeon species' real nature. Driven by the profound shifts caused by European hunters in the 1600s, along with mammalian predators introduced during colonization, these species faded before sound scientific documentation.

However, emerging technology is piecing together how these birds thrived, using bone evidence to indicate their speed and adaptation in local forests which were disrupted by human settlers. Notably, contemporary scientists like Dr. Mark Young and Dr. Neil Gostling spearheaded this research, suggesting vast biological misapprehensions and evidences coupling dodo with superiorly fit traits similar to current resilient avians.