Why can dodos fly

Contrary to popular narratives that these sailors hunted and ate the birds into extinction, it is unlikely that it was the people themselves that caused the decline, but the animals they brought with them. These included ship-rats and domestic dogs, cats, and pigs. These invasive species outcompeted the dodos for food and predated on their eggs, leading to decline in numbers and eventually complete loss of the species for ever. The loss of the dodo, a charismatic and culturally significant species, is a poignant example of the damage human activities can do to animals, particularly isolated island dwellers.

Island species are especially at risk as they are often endemic, evolutionarily distinct, and vulnerable to new disturbances. Less than 65 years later, the dodo was completely extinct; the last confirmed sighting of this hapless bird was in Until the modern era, the dodo had led a charmed life: There were no predatory mammals, reptiles, or even large insects on its island habitat and thus no need to evolve any natural defenses.

In fact, dodo birds were so innately trusting that they would actually waddle up to armed Dutch settlers—unaware that these strange creatures intended to kill and eat them—and they made irresistible lunches for these settlers' imported cats, dogs, and monkeys. It takes a lot of energy to maintain powered flight, which is why nature favors this adaptation only when it's absolutely necessary. After the dodo bird's pigeon ancestors landed on their island paradise, they gradually lost their ability to fly, at the same time evolving to turkey-like sizes.

Secondary flightlessness is a recurrent theme in bird evolution and has been observed in penguins, ostriches, and chickens, not to mention the terror birds that preyed on South American mammals only a few million years after the dinosaurs went extinct. Evolution is a conservative process: A given animal will produce only as many young as is strictly necessary to propagate the species.

Because the dodo bird had no natural enemies, females enjoyed the luxury of laying only one egg at a time. Most other birds lay multiple eggs in order to increase the odds of at least one egg hatching, escaping predators or natural disaster, and actually surviving.

This one-egg-per-dodo-bird policy had disastrous consequences when the macaques owned by Dutch settlers learned how to raid dodo nests, and the cats, rats, and pigs that invariably got loose from ships went feral and preyed on the chicks. Ironically, considering how indiscriminately they were clubbed to death by Dutch settlers, dodo birds weren't all that tasty. Dining options being fairly limited in the 17th century, though, the sailors who landed on Mauritius did the best with what they had, eating as much of the clubbed dodo carcasses as they could stomach and then preserving the leftovers with salt.

There's no particular reason the meat of the dodo would have been unsavory to human beings; after all, this bird subsisted on the tasty fruits, nuts, and roots native to Mauritius and possibly shellfish. Just to show what an anomaly the dodo bird was, genetic analysis of preserved specimens has confirmed that its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, a much smaller flying bird that ranges across the southern Pacific.

The dodo was endemic to the island of Mauritius, miles from the Eastern coast of Madagascar. The dodo was primarily a forest bird, occasionally venturing closer to the shoreline. More than 26 million years ago, these pigeon-like birds found paradise while exploring the Indian Ocean: the Mascarene Islands.

With abundant food and no predators, the birds had no reason to leave. And so, over the years their descendants slowly grew bigger and heavier, their beaks grew larger, their wings smaller: dodos evolved. When did the dodo go extinct? Until recently, the last confirmed dodo sighting on its home island of Mauritius was made in , but a estimate by David Roberts and Andrew Solow placed the extinction of the bird around Why did the dodo became extinct?

The dodo had no natural enemies on Mauritius. Life was sweet for dodos until humans also discovered the Mascarenes, in the late s. Despite the fact that humans were far bigger then them, dodos were not afraid of these intruders. Fearless and flightless, they were an easy prey.

Many thousands of animals, from at least 22 different species, perished as the lake transformed into a muddy, poisonous swamp. Some critters likely also simply got mired in the muck. Though many dodos died at Mare aux Songes—indeed, the swamp is a major source of preserved dodo bones—the species soldiered on.

Dinosaurs, another icon of extinction and obsolescence, had a reign of some million years. Excavations of Fort Frederik Hendrik, which housed Dutch settlers between and , suggests that the settlers fed mainly on livestock they brought to the island, as well as local fish.

The animal remains unearthed there have not included a single dodo bone. Some of these creatures, particularly pigs, would have eaten dodo eggs and chicks, while others competed with dodos for food.

Evolution is not some inexorable march toward progress and extinction is not a value judgment. Animals—even strong, fast, intelligent animals—die out for all sorts of reasons, killed off by climate change, or habitat destruction, or human exploitation, or just an asteroid-sized bit of bad luck.