dodo

Dodo, in the Bible

Dodo (dō`dō), in the Bible, father of the mighty man Eleazar. An alternate form is Dodai.

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dodo, extinct bird

dodo, a flightless forest-dwelling bird of Mauritius, extinct since the late 17th cent. The dodo was closely related to the two species of solitaire bird, extinct flightless giants found on the other islands in the Mascarene Islands. Although related to the pigeon, the dodo was larger than the wild turkey. The plumage was dark gray with a whitish breast, tail, and wings, and the large black bill had a horny terminal cap. The dodo laid only one egg at a time, on the ground. Although the bird's flesh was tough and unpalatable, European sailors and the pigs and rats they brought to Mauritius slaughtered the birds and destroyed its eggs, and it became extinct in roughly 50 years. The dodo appears in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where it may be the author's surrogate.

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dodo

Restoration of a dodo (Raphus cucullatus)

(credit: Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University)

Extinct flightless bird (Raphus cucullatus) of Mauritius, first seen by Portuguese sailors about 1507. Humans and the animals they introduced had exterminated the dodo by 1681. It weighed about 50 lbs (23 kg) and had blue-gray plumage, a big head, a 9-in. (23-cm) blackish bill with a reddish hooked tip, small useless wings, stout yellow legs, and a tuft of curly feathers high on its rear end. The Réunion solitaire (R. solitarius), also driven to extinction, may have been a white version of the dodo. Partial museum specimens and skeletons are all that remain of the dodo.

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dodo

large, flightless bird exterminated on Mauritius. [Ecology: Wallechinsky, 131]

See : Extinction