In 1662, the last dodo was sighted on Mauritius , in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch had settled on it a few decades earlier, and at that time, this flightless bird was hunted to extinction.
The looting of their nests and the introduction of invasive species into their habitat precipitated the rapid disappearance of the dodos, Raphus cucullatus . Of them, it is known that they were approximately one meter tall, weighed between 10 and 15 kilos and had a strong and long beak, more than 20 centimeters . They could be related to pigeons, and since they were first sighted by the Portuguese in the early 16th century, they have been considered clumsy animals, easy to catch and, in general, not very clever.
However, many aspects of its biology are still a mystery, as there are hardly any remains. Now, a new study, coordinated by Eugenia Gold, an anatomical scientist at Stony Brook University in New York, has revealed that the dodos weren’t particularly stupid. In fact, the size of its brain is adequate for a bird of its size. “It is neither too big nor too small. It is just the size you would expect, ”says Gold. “Although many factors are involved in the development of intelligence, if we take the relative size of the brain as a basic measure of it, we could conclude that the dodos were, in essence, as smart as a pigeon,” he says.
According to Gold and his collaborators in an article published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society , to determine this, they studied the skull of one of these animals, preserved in the Natural History Museum in London, using high-resolution computed tomography. His work has also revealed that both the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire, Pezophaps solitaria , another extinct bird, endemic to Rodrigues Island , in the Indian Ocean, had large olfactory bulbs, perhaps because they were terrestrial animals that depended on their smell. to get food.
Image: Jebulon via Wikimedia / CC0
