Dodo (didus ineptus, Linn.), a large bird of the island of Mauritius, at present placed in a subfamily of the order columboe, or pigeons. It has become extinct within two centuries. It was discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1497, and was mentioned by various voyagers, from Jacob van Neck and Wybrand van Warwijk in 1598, to Captain Talbot in 1697. In the work of Strickland and Melville on "The Dodo and its Kindred" (4to, London, 1848) are given many quaint descriptions and figures of the bird, which it appears was not uncommon in the 17th century, and was frequently used as food by the crews of vessels. In 1638 Francois Cauche says that he saw in Mauritius birds "larger than a swan, covered with a black down, with curled feathers on the rump, and similar ones in place of wings; that the beak was large and curved, the legs scaly, the nest made of herbs heaped together; that they lay but one egg of the size of a halfpenny roll or that of a pelican, and that the young ones had a stone in the gizzard." In the same year a living specimen was exhibited in London, and described by Sir Hamon Lestrange as a "great fowle, somewhat bigger than the largest turkey cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of a more erect shape, colored before like the breast of a young fesan, and the back of dun or deare color." In 1644 the Dutch began to colonize the island, and these birds were soon exterminated by the colonists, and by the dogs, cats, and rats, which devoured the eggs and the young in the nests; after the French took possession in 1715 the dodo is no longer mentioned as a living bird.

This is a most remarkable and clearly proved instance of the extinction of an animal by human agency; and as yet the data for determining the species are less than those left by many animals which perished ages ago from geological causes. Besides the rude drawings of the early voyagers given in Strickland's work, there are at least six oil paintings which are no doubt faith-fid copies of the living originals. The first of these paintings, the one copied in all books on natural history, and now in the British museum, is anonymous, but probably by one of the artists who painted the following ones; there are three pictures by Roland Savery, one at the Hague, another in Berlin dated 1626, and the third in Vienna dated 1628; a fifth painting is in the Ashmolean museum, by John Savery, dated 1651; and a sixth in the gallery of the duke of Northumberland, at Sion House, painted by Goeimare, and dated 1627. The principal remains of the dodo are a foot in the British museum, and a head and foot in the Ashmolean museum at Oxford, England, rendered familiar by numerous casts; the latter are all that is left of the specimen in Trades-cant's museum, and all that was saved from the flames which consumed the decayed specimens by order of the trustees in 1755; the head preserves the beak and nostrils, the bare skin of the face, and the partially feathered occiput; the eyes are dried within the sockets, but the horny end of the beak is gone.

A cranium exists in the museum at Copenhagen; a collection of bones at Paris, much incrusted with stalagmite, carried there in 1830; and others sent by Mr. Telfair to the Andersonian museum at Glasgow and to the London zoological society in 1833. The latter included a tibia and the head of a humerus of large size, with a broad articulating surface and a sudden reduction of the size of the shaft. The generic characters are a strong bill, much longer than the head, with the culmen straight at first and then arched to the tip, which is acute and overlaps the lower mandible; the latter has the gonys short and suddenly curved upward; the nostrils are in the membranous portion (which occupies two thirds of the bill), oblique and exposed; the wings imperfect; the tail apparently a tuft of five feathers, broad and curved upward; the tarsi robust, moderately long, and scaled; the outer toe is shorter than the inner, and the anterior toes are all free at the base; the hind toe is long, on the same plane with the others, and scaled; the claws are short, strong and blunt. Cuvier ranked the dodo with gallinaceous birds; others have traced out its analogies with the ostrich and with the penguin. Most writers, before the work of Strickland, considered it a modified form of raptorial bird.

Bernhardt of Copenhagen first referred the dodo to the pigeon family, and Strickland and Melville followed out this idea. They consider it a frugivorous terrestrial pigeon, colossal and brevipennate, coming near in the bill to the genus treron (Vieill.; vinago, Cuv.). The chief external characters of resemblance are the soft, depressed, and vascular nature of the long basal portion of the bill; the extent of the bare skin around the eyes and forehead; the hooked and compressed corneous portion of the upper mandible, overhanging the lower; the position of the nostril in the middle of the beak, and near its lower margin; the sudden sinking from the forehead to the beak, and the rapid narrowing in front of the orbits; the short, robust tarsi, and expansion of the lower surface of the toes; the low plane of the hind toe; the relative lengths of the toes as compared with the ground pigeons, the absence of interdigital webs, and the short blunt claws. Among internal characters, gathered from the narratives of voyagers and the paintings of the bird from nature, are the presence of a large crop, a very muscular gizzard, the palatableness of the flesh, and the laying of a single egg.

Besides these characters are the absence of the vomer; the form and direction of the bones, processes, and foramina of the skull; the form of the metatarsal and tarso-metatarsal bones, processes, and canals; and especially the passage of these canals on the outside of the posterior tarsal ridge. Mr. Allis detected only 11 sclerotic plates, as in the pigeons, no other birds having so small a number. Its food was probably dates, cocoanuts, mangoes, and such other fruits as would fall from the tropical trees. Strickland calls it "a young duck or gosling enlarged to the dimensions of a swan; .... a permanent nestling, clothed with down instead of feathers, and with the wings and tail so short and feeble as to be utterly unsubservient to flight." While Strickland was preparing his work in England, Dr. S. Cabot, jr., of Boston, published a paper in the "Journal of the Boston Society of Natural History " (vol. v., p. 490), entitled "The Dodo a Rasorial and not a Rapacious Bird;" in this he comes to the same conclusions as the first mentioned author, and without any knowledge of his views.

He says " that the dodo was a gigantic pigeon, and that, as its general shape, feathering, etc, resemble more strongly the young than the adult pigeon, we may perhaps be allowed to surmise that it properly belongs to an earlier epoch than the present, and has become extinct because its time was run." Prof. Brandt of St. Petersburg, in 1848, maintained the affinity of the dodo to the charadriadoe or plovers, which he styles pigeoned-formed or dove-like waders. The testimony seems overwhelming in favor of the columbine affinities of the dodo. - In the island of Rodriguez lived another large brevipennate bird, the solitaire, allied to the pigeons.

The Dodo (Didus ineptus).

The Dodo (Didus ineptus).