Extinct thinking: was the hapless dodo really destined to die out?

New research hints that far from being the greedy, clumsy bird of legend, the dodo was a resilient animal whose demise was caused by an ecological disaster

"You Dutch people killed the dodo. And now that they are extinct, you come back for their bones as well!" A thing you might hear when you are a Dutch palaeontologist excavating dodo bones on Mauritius. It is an understandable sentiment, but a wrong one.

Despite its iconic status, we have very few clues about where the dodo came from, and how and when it arrived on the remote island of Mauritius, located about 500 km east of Madagascar. DNA evidence indicates that the dodo's closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, a glossy-feathered ground-dwelling pigeon from Southeast Asia. The dodo's ancestor may have island-hopped from Southeast Asia all the way down to the isolated Mascarene Islands, but the details of its journey remain fuzzy at best. After millions of years of idyllic island life, humans, in the form of Dutch sailors eager to stretch their legs after months on sea, arrived on Mauritius in 1598. As is often the case, catastrophe ensued. Less than a century after the first humans set foot on the island, the dodo had left the stage.