Remarkable Discovery of a Dodo Skeleton on Mauritus

I will be the first to admit that when I did a search in google.com images for a "dodo" I half expected that the image that would be returned was one of George Bush - but no such luck.

This story from Yahoo.com news is pretty spectacular if you have an interest in ornithology which, coincidently, I do.

BOIS CHERI, Mauritius (Reuters) - The remains of a dodo found in a cave beneath bamboo and tea plantations in Mauritius offer the best chance yet to learn about the extinct flightless bird, a scientist said on Friday.

The following information about the extinct flightless bird comes from Wikipedia

The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a flightless bird that lived on the islands of Mauritius. Related to pigeons and doves, it stood about a meter tall (three feet), lived on fruit and nested on the ground.

The dodo has been extinct since the mid-to-late 17th century. It is commonly used as the archetype of an extinct species because its extinction occurred during recorded human history, and was directly attributable to human activity. The phrase as dead as a dodo means undoubtedly and unquestionably dead.

As with many animals evolving in isolation from significant predators, the dodo was entirely fearless of people, and this, in combination with its flightlessness, made it easy prey. But journals are full of reports regarding the bad taste and tough meat of the dodo, while other local species such as the Red Rail were praised for their taste. It is commonly believed that the Malay sailors held the bird in high regard and killed them only to make head dressings used in religious ceremonies. However, when humans first arrived on Mauritius, they also brought with them other animals that had not existed on the island before, including dogs, pigs, cats, rats, and Crab-eating Macaques, which plundered the dodo nests, while humans destroyed the forests where the birds made their homes; currently, the impact these animals — especially the pigs and macaques — had on the dodo population is considered to have been more severe than that of hunting. The 2005 expedition's finds are apparently of animals killed by a flash flood; such mass mortalities would have further jeopardized an already extinction-prone species.

Although there are scattered reports of mass killings of dodos for provisioning of ships, archaeological investigations have hitherto found scant evidence of human predation on these birds. Some bones of at least two dodos were found in caves at Baie du Cap which were used as shelters by fugitive slaves and convicts in the 17th century, but due to their isolation in high, broken terrain were not easily accessible to dodos naturally. By 1755, Cossigny reports that the number of refugees and settlers which cut down the inland forest was so high that the well-flighted Mauritius Blue Pigeon was rapidly declining all over the island.[citation needed]

There is some controversy surrounding the extinction date of the dodo. Roberts & Solow state that "the extinction of the Dodo is commonly dated to the last confirmed sighting in 1662, reported by shipwrecked mariner Volkert Evertsz" (Evertszoon), but many other sources suggest the more conjectural date 1681. Roberts & Solow point out that because the sighting prior to 1662 was in 1638, the dodo was likely already very rare by the 1660s, and that thus a disputed report from 1674 cannot be dismissed off-hand. Statistical analysis of the hunting records of Issac Johannes Lamotius, carried out by Julian Hume and coworkers,give a new estimated extinction date of 1693, with a 95% confidence interval of 1688 to 1715. Considering more circumstantial evidence such as travelers' reports and the lack of good reports after 1689, it is likely that the dodo became extinct before 1700; thus, the last Dodo died barely more than a century after the species' discovery in 1581.

Hopefully there wont be more dodo's in the list of extinct birds of the world, but with a burgeoning human population and the lack of any form of a land ethic in most of the people of the world, the dodo will likely be the first of many more extinctions, not just one of a few extinctions.