The Last Dodo: What We Actually Know About How It Went Extinct

The dodo is one of the most famous animals in history, which makes it genuinely surprising how little we actually know about it. We have no complete skeleton from a single individual. The majority of dodo bones in museum collections are composites assembled from multiple different birds. Every image of the dodo in popular culture traces back to a handful of 17th-century Dutch paintings that scientists now believe got several things wrong. The bird has been extinct for about 350 years and we are still arguing about what it looked like.

What we do know is that the dodo was a large flightless bird, a relative of pigeons and doves, living only on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. It had no natural predators and had never needed to develop fear of anything. Dutch sailors arrived in 1598. Within roughly a century, the dodo was gone.

What It Was Actually Like

The popular image of the dodo is of a fat, waddling, stupid bird that practically asked to be eaten. This image comes largely from a single painting by the Dutch artist Roelandt Savery from around 1626, which depicted a distinctly rotund bird. That painting was so detailed and so widely reproduced that subsequent artists copied it, and the puffed-up dodo became canonical.

Recent science suggests Savery’s bird was probably either obese from captivity, painted from a stuffed specimen that had been overstuffed, or simply inaccurate. Skeletal analysis indicates the dodo was leaner and more upright than the traditional image suggests. It was likely an active bird with strong legs, capable of moving quickly through the forests of Mauritius. The name walghvoghel, meaning repulsive bird, which Dutch sailors gave it, referred to the tough stringy texture of the meat rather than any assessment of the bird’s character.

Contrary to older accounts, more recent research suggests dodo meat was actually considered quite palatable by sailors, which complicates the narrative that humans only hunted it half-heartedly. The bird probably ate fruits, seeds, roots, and possibly shellfish. It swallowed stones to help grind hard food, like modern pigeons. It almost certainly nested on the ground, which became a critical vulnerability.

How the Extinction Happened

Direct hunting by sailors contributed to the decline, but most researchers now agree it was not the primary cause. The Dutch brought with them a menagerie of animals that Mauritius had never encountered: dogs, cats, pigs, rats, and macaques. These animals ate dodo eggs and chicks directly from ground nests. Pigs, which can cover considerable ground and root through undergrowth efficiently, were particularly destructive. The dodo had no behavioral response to these threats because nothing like them had ever existed in its environment.

Simultaneously, Dutch settlers cleared the coastal lowland forests where dodos primarily lived. The habitat shrank. The bird’s food sources declined. Floods and cyclones, which the dodo had previously survived for centuries, now hit a population already weakened by multiple simultaneous pressures. The combination of hunting, introduced predators, and habitat loss produced a collapse within roughly 80 years of first contact. This was fast even by the standards of historical extinctions.

When Was the Last One

This is where it gets genuinely complicated. The last widely accepted sighting is from 1662, when a Dutch sailor named Volkert Evertsz, shipwrecked off Mauritius, described catching birds on a small coastal islet that matched the dodo’s description. He noted they were tame and easy to approach.

However, other accounts push the date later. Hunting records from 1688 by the governor of Mauritius, Isaac Johannes Lamotius, include what some researchers interpret as dodo sightings. A 2003 statistical analysis published in Nature by David Roberts and Andrew Solow, using all ten known sightings as data points, estimated the actual extinction date at around 1690. Some analyses place it as late as 1693.

The truth is that nobody knows when the last dodo died. The historical record from Mauritius in the late 17th century was not organized around tracking a single bird species. People stopped reporting dodo sightings, and at some point there were no more dodo sightings to report, and the gap between those two facts is where the last dodo lives.

The De-Extinction Project

In September 2025, a company called Colossal Biosciences reported its first successful cultivation of pigeon primordial germ cells, a critical early step toward eventually producing a dodo-like bird through gene editing and the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative. Whether a bird produced this way would be a dodo in any meaningful biological sense remains contested among scientists. Whether it matters symbolically is a separate question.

The species we lost was leaner and more active than the image we remember. It went extinct not from stupidity but from the complete absence of any evolutionary preparation for what arrived on its island. It stopped being believed in almost immediately after it vanished. The last dodo died alone, somewhere on Mauritius, probably in the late 1680s, and nobody noticed.