Science: Dodo

The late, famed dodo bird died of stupidity sometime in the 17th Century. A clumsy, pigeon-like groundling, larger than a turkey, the dodo lived on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Life in that restricted world was so safe and so easy that the dodo became defenseless. With the arrival of settlers on Mauritius, the birds were slaughtered by man & beast. The dodo’s flesh was tough and tasteless and it might have survived in spite of its dim-witted clumsiness—but pigs smashed the eggs and monkeys ate the young.

Last week Washington’s Smithsonian Institution proudly announced completion of a postwar project: a new reconstruction of the dodo, a rare item in U.S. museums. Smithsonian curators were sure that their newest version, made in almost equal parts of old bones, guttapercha, historical data and imagination, is the most complete and accurate reconstruction in the U.S.