Extinction of the dodo

The dodo was a large flightless relative of pigeons, about a meter tall, found only on Mauritius, a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean. Portuguese sailors probably visited around 1507, but the first clear written account came from Dutch sailors in 1598. The last widely accepted sighting was in 1662, when a shipwrecked Dutchman named Volkert Evertsz saw one on a small islet off the island. The bird thus disappeared within about a century of its discovery.¹²³

The dodo had evolved with no land predators and lost the power of flight, laying a single egg in a ground nest. Ships of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, used Mauritius as a stopover on the route to the Spice Islands, and from 1638 the Dutch kept a settlement there. Sailors and settlers brought rats, pigs, dogs and crab-eating macaques, which ate eggs and chicks, and cleared forest. The main cause was probably the introduced animals. At the time few thinkers believed species could vanish. Georges Cuvier argued in the 1790s that fossil animals had gone extinct, and in 1848 Hugh Strickland and Alexander Melville's monograph The Dodo and Its Kindred established the dodo as a real species that people had lost. It became a symbol, through Alice in Wonderland in 1865 and the phrase dead as a dodo.¹²³