The dodo was a flightless bird native to Mauritius, and was first described in 1598. It's been said that the dodo was so friendly that it would walk right up to people, making it easy to kill. These birds didn't have any natural predators besides man, and the last confirmed sighting was in 1662. That's barely a half-century that we knew about them, and afterward it wwa said that dodos were mythical all along. But they were real, and we have a few skeletons to prove it. But I just now learned that we really don't know what the dodo looked like! A few paintings were made, but these were often painted by artists who had never seen the actual bird.
Sir David Attenborough tells us what we know and what we don't know about the dodo, including some speculation on what they really looked like based on genetic testing. The animated dodo he is talking to may or may not be an accurate representative. Attenborough, however, is real in this clip from the PBS series Nature. -via Born in Space
Comments (0)