The word "dodo" is synonymous with extinct animals. In fact, if you asked people to name an extinct animal who wasn't a dinosaur or woolly mammoth, dodo bird would probably be the most popular response.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00If there's one thing most people know about the dodo bird, it's that they were dumb.
00:04If they had been human, they would have been the kind of person who'd change his pants
00:08while driving.
00:09Yes, legend has it, this creature was only really ever a danger to itself, a true poster
00:15child for the Darwin Awards.
00:17At least, that's the story we've been fed.
00:19But is it true?
00:20Turns out, the whole story that the dumb dodo got itself hunted to extinction by being so
00:25stupid may have been a big load of doo-doo.
00:27Léon Klaassen, professor of vertebrae paleontology and evolution at Netherlands' Maastricht University,
00:34believes the Dutch sailors who first encountered the bird in 1598 didn't actually hunt the
00:39birds to extinction, though the sailors likely had an indirect role in the demise of the
00:43species.
00:44Previously, it was believed that birds were fat and were hunted for food, but in the dense
00:49jungles of their native Mauritius, the bird would have been much leaner than previously
00:54thought, and therefore not as appetizing of a meal.
00:57Further, these jungles would have also made it much harder for the few hundred sailors
01:01to catch the birds, regardless of how unafraid the dodos were of human beings.
01:06Klaassen believes the real problem was the rats and other animals that would have landed
01:10with the sailors.
01:12These animals would have been able to multiply quickly in an unrestricted habitat, and would
01:16have feasted on dodo eggs and out-competed them for food, a double-extinction whammy.
01:22And then the triple whammy hit, rapid habitat loss.
01:25The island of Mauritius was not initially considered very valuable, just a place for
01:29ships to stop over.
01:31Some even thought the island was cursed due to a large amount of shipwrecks in the area.
01:35That all changed when the Dutch realized they could export the island's ebony wood for sale,
01:40which became the island's primary economic activity.
01:43Not long after, settlers were turning the once-wild island into a big agricultural plantation,
01:49leading to heavy deforestation and loss of native plant species.
01:53The forests that provided natural protection for the dodo bird gave way to sugarcane fields,
01:58making the birds oversized, sitting ducks for any predator who came along, as the dodos
02:03literally had no fight-or-flight reflex.
02:06Lack of flight also made dodos ill-suited to surviving natural disasters.
02:11Evidence has been found that even before human settlement, many of the birds died in flash
02:15floods brought on by cyclones.
02:18Once they lost the natural protection of their sheltered forests, they became even more vulnerable.
02:23The entry for dodo in the Oxford English Dictionary describes something that is no longer effective,
02:28valid, or interesting, and the origin of the word comes from the Portuguese dodo, translating
02:34to simpleton.
02:36It's a sad legacy for what was once a beautiful, totally innocent creature.
02:40Beyond their reputation for stupidity, dodos are a symbol of how quickly and profoundly
02:45humans can impact an environment and drive a species to extinction.
02:49Until we can clone them, dodos are gone forever, and the best thing we can do about it is to
02:54learn from the mistakes of our ancestors.
02:56It only took 100 years to wipe out the dodo, and while exact dates of extinction vary,
03:01most believe the dodo was gone by the 1660s, with other reports claiming they lasted on
03:06nearby islands until the 1690s.
03:08In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter much, because either way, the bird,
03:13and just about every trace of it, is gone forever.
03:16All we've got are a few records and sketches from sailors, and one or two shoddily stuffed
03:20birds in museums.
03:22We're hardly even sure what color they were.
03:24Most paintings from the time show dodos with white feathers, but firsthand accounts describe
03:29them with gray-to-black plumage.
03:31Heck, we didn't even know they had kneecaps until 2014, after a 3D scan of the last remaining
03:37skeleton revealed them.
03:39So have we learned our lesson?
03:41Not yet, it seems.
03:42In another 100 years, it's estimated that 25 percent of all bird species will be extinct
03:47in the wild unless we take big steps to clean up our act.
03:50If not, we'll be the real dodos.