Raphus cucullatus, or dodo. Wax and plaster model, mid-19th century, National Museum of Natural History, Paris • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Located in the Indian Ocean, 900 km east of Madagascar, Mauritius remained uninhabited until 1598, when the Dutch settled there and named it after Maurice de Nassau, their prince. Arab merchants had already seen it by chance in the X th century, and the Portuguese, who disembarked there in 1507 to explore it, noticed that the island was populated by birds with imposing beaks, so large that they could not fly and so easy to kill with blows of a club. that they nicknamed them dod-oersen or dadares , "sleepy bird". A “bird of disgust” The fauna and flora that abounded on this volcanic island had developed away from the African continent. In the absence of natural predators, the dodo, or Raphus cucullatus , had thus evolved from columbids from Madagascar and fed on fruits, shells, insects and even seeds, which it broke with its powerful beak. Unable to fly under the weight of the abundant fat reserves it built up during the wet season to get through the dry season and face its relative food shortages, it had completely adapted to the terrestrial environment. The Dutch, who occupied the island for about twenty years, settled there by building Fort Frederik Hendrik on its east coast, where ships heading for the East Indies could refuel. All around this construction they introduced crops of lemon, orange and sugar cane, but also dogs, cats, pigs, goats, cows, deer and monkeys. In the ebony forests that the settlers tried to exploit lived the dodo, which the Dutch nicknamed Walghvogel , "bird of disgust", because of its inedible flesh. “The more it is cooked, the less tender it is and the more tasteless it is,” Admiral Wybrand van Warwijck wrote about it in 1598 in his travel diary. Go the way of the dodo The dodo was not a victim of the Dutch themselves, but of wild pigs and rats who arrived in their ships and easily attacked the nests that the bird made on the ground, without any protection. The last specimen was seen in 1662, and the date of extinction of the dodo is around 1690. The dodo passed to posterity thanks to Lewis Carroll, who raised it in 1865 to the rank of literary character in his novel Alice in Wonderland . Its popularity was such that the expression go the way of the dodo , literally "to meet the same fate as the dodo", was soon adopted by British society to signify the transition from life to death. It has since been erected as a symbol of the extermination of an animal species by the human species. The mystery surrounding the dodo took a long time to dissipate. With little more reliable information than rare travelogues, drawings and secular paintings, scientists set about reconstructing the true appearance of the bird from skeletal debris that had reached them. Until the middle of the 19 th century, only one skull and leg were known from Oxford, another leg from London, and other skulls from Prague and Copenhagen from dissected specimens. A candidate species for cloning After the discovery in 1865 by the naturalist George Black of more than 300 dodo bones in the south-east of Mauritius, the only complete skeleton was unearthed in a cave located not far from the Pouce mountain. The study of this specimen and other bones has made it possible to question its traditional image of a clumsy fat pigeon, conveyed by one of its most famous representations:the painting by Fleming Roelant Savery, painted in 1626. By testifying to a more slender and slender animal, the engravings made on the island at the beginning of its colonization indeed suggest that the painter would have been inspired by one of the specimens force-fed by the colonists and brought back to Europe to amaze their contemporaries. The dodo, whose genome has been fully sequenced since 2016, is now among the candidate species for cloning. Symbol of animal extinction, could this funny bird one day repopulate its Mauritian habitat?
