Animal of the Dead: Dodo

Animals are cool. There are so many types of animals in the world and they all have cool characteristics. Wolves live in packs, cheetahs are known for being fast, flying fish can literally fly. These animals are cool and all, but there are animals that are even more impressive. And no, not humans. I’m talking about extinct animals. Dinosaurs, Cenozoic creatures, ocean monsters, all types of animals that lived in the past, but now they're extinct. Even though they are dead, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be remembered. This is the beginning of “Animal of the Dead.”

The first animal that I’m going to talk about is the dodo. The dodo was a bird that actually died out 341 years ago. The dodo was a flightless bird that lived in a country called Mauritius. Mauritius is an island of the Indian Ocean. The dodo wasn’t alone in Mauritius and lived with two other species of birds, Réunion solitaire and Rodrigues solitaire. The other two birds went extinct around the same time the dodo did. Réunion solitaire died out 276 years ago while the Rodrigues solitaire died out 232 years ago. The reason these animals survived longer than most other prehistoric creatures was because there were no carnivores in Mauritius at the time. Dodos did eventually go extinct because of Portuguese sailors. These sailors hunted the dodos and birds also suffered from habitat loss.

The dodo is bigger than a turkey and weighed about fifty pounds. It had a blue-gray plumage, a big head, and a nine inch bill. They had useless wings and yellow legs. All that remains of a dodo is a head at Oxford and a foot at Copenhagen. A lot of incomplete dodo skeletons can be found in Europe, the US, and Mauritius. The dodo is a pretty weird bird.