Well , “ too dumb to go ” might be an unfair characterization . But dodos are legendary for their arrant deficiency of a survival of the fittest instinct when it occur to humans . Turns out humans were n’t the only threat they just never quite read .
Native to the island of Mauritius , dodos had evolved without reverence of humans , because why would they ? When humankind did show up , their lack of caveat made them light quarry for hungry sailors , even if by most report dodo meat was n’t very good . Since they were also flightless , the dodo had pretty much no defense , even if they had been able to knead out that humans were bad news . Just eighty - three years after their first sighting in 1598 , they were out , and they soon became the stuff of legend before 19th century research confirm they had actually existed .
Because pretty much the only people who ever discover dodos were skimmer , not scientists , and because excavations from the 19th to mid-20th century were n’t especially careful in preserving the recovered fogy remains , there ’s still a lot we do n’t really do it about these poor creatures . That ’s why a new find by Smithsonian paleontologist Hanneke Meijer is so exciting . Since 2005 , she and her team have excavating a internet site on Mauritius that was a small lake in the middle of a dry area grand of class ago . They have turned up loads of small fossils there , and their later excavation has uncovered much larger specimens , include those of the fogey and a now extinct species of gargantuan tortoise .
Intriguingly , most of these big fogy all seem to date between 4,235 and 4,100 years ago , as though there was something unequaled going on in that 135 - class period that would explain all those deaths . And digging in both Africa and South America have indeed revealed something unequalled during that time frame : a monolithic global drought , one that evidently included Mauritius as well . But , as ScienceNOW reports , it was n’t the drought itself that killed the dodos . And I ’m afraid the most likely explanation for all these death does n’t on the dot proffer a reverberate endorsement of these birds ’ common signified :
More than three - fourths of the fogey bones unearthed—235 castanets from at least 17 soul , the researchers estimate — amount from the legs and feet . Moreover , Meijer say , all of the bones are well - preserved , showing no sign of being exposed to the constituent and no grounds of being gnawed by predators or scavengers .
If the fogey had die of famishment or thirstiness , the researchers contend , their carcase would have lain in the open before they were covered by sediment , leaving them expose to weathering or scavenging . The salutary explanation for the fogey demise , they say , is that the sizable , hungry birds tried to cover the clay flat to give the drought - shrunken lake and got mired in the muck . While the upper portions of the dodos would have been exhibit — and therefore susceptible to decomposition or to scavenging — the legs , already bury , would have been more likely to be uphold intact .
Meijer estimates that about 34,000 fogy got lay to rest in this one region during the drouth , suggesting that at least 33,999 dodos never quite figured out why it was a risky estimate to take the air across those mud flats . In fairness , there ’s also thought to be about 300,000 jumbo tortoise buried there from the same fourth dimension menses , so the fogey were far from the only creatures that were terminally slow on the uptake .
For more , correspond outScienceNOW . Original paper atNaturwissenschaften . double by C. Julian Pender Hume .
BiologyFossilislandPaleontologyScience
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