The fogey has catch the imagination of hoi polloi ever since if first went out some 400 years ago , not least for the warning tale it tells . But despite the massive floor of aid garnered by the squat animate being , much of the bird ’s living has been shrouded in mystery story .
Now , novel research is disgorge lightness onthe plump shuttlecock ’s life chronicle , divulge when it believably laid its nut and even that it in all likelihood slough not long after the showery time of year had drag its island home . Interestingly , the selective information reap from study the idle birds ’ bones also equalize up nicely with what sailors at the time reported about the dodo , and which until now had seemed contradictory .
The fogey pass a blissful few million years livingisolated on the tropic islandof Mauritius . With no predators around and a ample supply of fruit , its pigeon ancestor descend to the forest floor and stay there , fix a living among the giant tortoise and giant skinks . But that island paradise was soon to be add crashing to the ground , as humans made landfall and find the birds tasty and easy to catch .
Coupled with the introduction of fuzz , monkeys , and rat , all of which had a penchant for the eggs of the ground nesting bird , and the dodo ’s fate was sealed . Within 100 years of discovery , the dodo was no more . The celerity of this extermination meant that , while a few birds were shipped overseas , very slight info really live as to how the Bronx cheer lived , what it ate , or even how it looked .
Writing in the journalScientific Reports , research worker have turn to the bones of the enigmatic birds , which contain clues as to how the boo grew , matured , and reproduced . They found that dodo chicks belike hatched in August , before grow very rapidly to adult size . The scientist suggest that this was most likely to give them a survival advantage when cyclones tend to hit the island between November and March .
This work has afford us more unexampled information and intellect about the ecology of the mysterious dodo than has been achieved over the last few hundred eld . By grasping how the bird survive and grew while on Mauritius , the investigator hope to well understand the exact factors that extend to its experimental extinction .
