An international team of scientists are, as I write this, standing in a swamp in Mauritius, looking for dodo bones. They have gone out to excavate a mass dodo grave, uncovered in November by a team of Dutch scientists, led by geoscientist Dr Kenneth Rijsdijk.
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A curious history
Little is known about the dodo, which is surprising given that the flightless bird is famous as an icon of extinction. The birds, which lived exclusively on the island of Mauritius, were wiped out by 1681, soon after Dutch settlers landed there. No complete Dodo skeleton exists and a stuffed bird, held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, became so moth-eaten that it was thrown out in 1755, although a head and one foot remain.
Part of the dodo's enduring appeal comes from its bizarre appearance - a large grey bird, with a comical beak, small useless wings and a large belly that allegedly scraped along the ground when it tried to run. By the 1800s, biologists were beginning to doubt whether the bird existed at all. The paintings of it looked ridiculous and with only a head and a foot for proof, maybe it was just a sailor's yarn. But when archaeologists uncovered bones and when Lewis Carroll used it as a character in his book "Alice in Wonderland", a "dodo craze" began and its appeal has never waned since.
The name dodo comes from the Portuguese word for "fool", since Portuguese and Dutch settlers considered the bird foolish, not only for its looks but because it had no fear of the armed hungry humans who shared its space.
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| Detail of a copy of a painting "signed" by the artist F. John entitled "Dodo oder Dronte". |
Puke Bird
But this view, that the Dutch settlers ate the dodos to extinction, may well be just one more myth that surrounds the creature. It doesn't square with the reports that the bird tasted really bad, as archaeologist Pieter Floore explains: "The first myth is it wasn't hunted to extinction by the Dutch settlers…. the first descriptions of the Dodo are not so pleasant; they tried to cook the animal but it was too tough and too disgusting to eat… they called it the Puke Bird."
He thinks that the likely culprits are the non-native animals that came with the settlers, the domestic animals and the rats and mice, which would prey on the eggs and chicks. Fellow team member and paleobotanist Frans Bunnick explains why this could have been a particular problem for the dodo:
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Detail of "The Dodo & Given", a painting by G. Edwards (1759) |
Mass Grave
Finding the cache of dodo bones was, in part, a stoke of luck because Kenneth Rijsdijk and colleagues were looking for organic debris, such as seeds and fossilized pollen to reconstruct historical vegetation from the island.
The team discovered the bones in a swampy area near a sugar plantation on the southeast of the island. But the skeletons nearly remained undiscovered; the process of extracted soil samples was so arduous that the team nearly gave up several times, as Dr Rijsdijk recounts:
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The Calvaria, a hardwood species, were able to survive for 300 years without the bird but nearly went the same way as the dodo. An ornithologist came to the rescue with turkeys. Seeds from the last 13 trees were fed turkeys, and were suitably digested to start growing into seedlings. However the science behind this story, like so many stories that surround the dodo, is considered unreliable. |
Dodos' extinction continues to have impacts. In 1973, a scientist suggested that the Mauritian tree, the Calvaria or Tambalacoque, was dying out because it had entrusted its reproductive future with the dodo. Seeds from the tree needed to pass through the gut of the dodo before they would sprout.After finding bone fragments in their core samples, the team brought a digger and started to excavate the site further. They found over 700 bones from at least 20 dodo adults and chicks and Dr Rijsdijk believes that there are more to be excavated from the site. The bones, thought to be up to 2000 years old, were said to have been recovered from a single layer of earth and among the haul were sections of beaks and the remains of dodo chicks.
Well-preserved
The excavation site is unusual in several ways that have helped the team. The Mare aux Songes site was an old rubbish dump, which protected it from further development, unusual for an area close to the beach on an island dependant on tourism. Nowhere else on the island have such well-preserved remains been found, suggesting that there must be some very special qualities to the soil. The current trip intends to find out more about why preservation is so good.
Joining the dig this time around is Dr Julian Hume, world expert in dodos from the Natural History Museum in London, and Dr Beth Shapiro from Oxford, who is hoping to find dodo DNA preserved within the swamp. Analysing its DNA will help to place this extraordinary bird on the avian family tree, although Dr Rijsdijk says that the idea of using DNA to recreate the animal is more science fiction than science.
Tags: archeology, DNA, dodo, Dutch, extinct species, Mauritius, Netherlands, puke