Why did the dodos disappear? Detailed answer

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Why did the dodos disappear? Detailed answer

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Why did the dodos disappear?

a) They were hunted for food.
b) They were hunted for fun.
c) Due to the disappearance of the habitual habitat.
d) Because of competition with other species.

The Mauritian dodo, or dodo (Raphus cucullatus), is invariably considered a symbol of two phenomena: deadness and stupidity.

The flightless natives of the island of Mauritius, dodos evolved in an environment free from terrestrial predators, and disappeared from the face of the earth in less than a hundred years, because, firstly, the forest was destroyed - their habitat, and secondly, the island bred pigs, rats and dogs brought in by the colonists. Incredibly, the dodo's ancestors were common pigeons. However, unlike another world-famous extinct species, the passenger pigeon, no one hunted these birds for food, since dodo meat was practically inedible - the Dutch even called dodos walgvogel, that is, "disgusting bird".

The Portuguese name dodo is also not very flattering, it means "blockhead". The dodo, feeling completely safe, was not at all afraid of people, and therefore did not run away anywhere and, therefore, was of no value for hunting. By 1700, the Mauritian dodo had disappeared entirely.

In 1755, the director of Ashmole, the Museum of Natural History and Archeology at Oxford University, decided that their stuffed dodo was too damaged by bugs and moths to keep it any longer, and ordered that the "garbage" be thrown into the fire. It was the only dodo exhibit left in the world. A worker passing by tried to pull the scarecrow out of the fire, but he managed to save only the head and part of the paw.

For a long time, everything we knew about the dodo was based on these pitiful remains, a few descriptions, three or four oil paintings, and a handful of bones. We even knew a lot more about dinosaurs. Only in December 2005, scientists managed to discover a mass grave of dodos in Mauritius, which made it possible to more accurately reproduce the appearance of the legendary bird.

From the disappearance of the Mauritian dodos until the release of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, the dodo was hardly remembered. Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) taught mathematics at Oxford and most likely saw a dodo in the Ashmolean Museum.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the dodo appears in the "running in circles" scene, a contest where "everyone ran when they wanted and stopped when they wanted" and where everyone wins and everyone gets a reward. Each of the birds in this scene is an allusion to the real faces that were present on the boat excursion when Dodgson told his story for the first time, and the Dodo, according to the writer's creativity, is Lewis Carroll himself.

John Tenniel's illustrations quickly brought the dodo back to its former glory. The idiom "dead as a dodo" (outdated) also applies to this period.

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

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There is a special state of matter called "disordered superhomogeneity", in which the substance has the properties of a crystal and a liquid at the same time. It was first discovered by physicists in liquid helium and simple plasmas, but has recently been encountered by biologists while studying the chicken eye. Like other diurnal birds, chickens have five types of photoreceptors: red, blue, green, violet, and responsible for the perception of light. All of them are located on the retina in one layer at first glance randomly, however, a detailed study of the patterns revealed that around each cone there is a so-called forbidden zone, in which the appearance of other cones of the same type is excluded. As a result, the system cannot take a single ordered form, but tends to be as homogeneous as possible.

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