DODO, Didus, a genus of birds commonly ranked among the brevipennes (q.v.) or struthious birds (ostrich, cassowary, etc.), although exhibiting very anomalous peculi arities; but still more interesting because, whilst it appears to be now completely extinct, its extinction has taken place very recently, and through the agency of man; at least one species (D. ineptus) being known to have existed less than 200 years since. It is described by several voyagers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and seems even to have been brought alive to Europe. It inhabited the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius. 'That any species of D. was ever seen by European voyagers in Madagascar, is not so certain; and the solitaire (q.v.) of the island of Rodriguez, now also extinct, was a very different bird. The D. according to the descriptions given of it by those who saw it, and which are confirmed by pictorial representations, apparently not unworthy of con fidence, was a bird larger than a swan; of a very heavy, clumsy form and correspond ing gait, with short thick scale-covered legs; three rather short toes before and one behind; large head; very large bill, the upper mandible longer than the under, and much hooked at the point; the wings so short as to be of no use for flight, and furnished only with a few black feathers; the general plumage a kind of grayish-down; the tail merely a tuft or bunch curiously curled feathers. The D. was so abundant when some of the first voyagers visited Mauritius, that they became satiated with its flesh, although they describe it, particularly the breast, as good for food. The birds were easily killed, being wholly unable to fly, and running slowly. Their speedy extinction after the
islands began to be visited and settled, is thus easily accounted for. The D. seems to have been adapted for living in tropical woods, where the luxuriant vegetation afforded it a ready supply of food, and its powerful hooked bill, which has led some naturalists to assign it a place among birds of prey, was probably intended for tearing vegetable and not animal substances. However singular this bill is in a struthious bird, it has been well remarked that it is not more so than the very different bill of the apteryx.
There are rude figures of the D. in several works of the 17th c., and in particular one, evidently superior to the rest, in Bontius (edited by Piso, 1658)—who calls the bird dronte or dodaers—which perfectly correspond with the descriptions given of it, with a painting preserved in the British museum, said to have been drawn in Holland from the living bird, and with a representation of it discovered by prof. Owen in 1838 in Savery's picture of "Orpheus and the Beasts" at the Hague, which he thinks "must have been copied from a study of the living bird." A foot of the D. is amongst the valued treasures of the British museum; a head and a foot are preserved in the Ashmolean museum at Oxford. It must ever be cause of regret, that a stuffed specimen which once existed in the Ashmolean museum was allowed to decay, and finally destroyed 'in 1755 by order of the curators, who little imagined that portions of it escaping their sentence were to become objects of the high est interest to the whole scientific world.