SCIENCE

Dodos, best known for being dead and, well, dumb, may not have been total doofuses. (Washington Post)

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Discussion Ideas

• The name of the new research paper is “The first endocast of the extinct dodo.” What is an endocast?
  • An endocast is an internal cast (impression) of a hollow object, usually referring to the brain case or cranial vault of an animal.

• What was surprising about the new endocast of the dodo?
  • The dodo’s brain case was much larger than most people expected. (“I was not on a mission to redeem the dodo, but that’s what it turned out to be,” says lead author Eugenia Gold.)
    • The dodo’s brain was “about the same size (relative to body mass) one would see in modern pigeons.” Pigeons are the dodo’s closest living relatives (see a resemblance?) and fairly smart birds—they can navigate across long and varied terrain, be trained as couriers, and even be taught to read mammograms.

• If dodos weren’t dumbos, how did they get their dim-bulb reputation?
  • Well, look at them.
  • Just 30 years before their extinction, most dodos had never encountered the world’s Apex Predator #1. (Although dodos’ native habitat, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, had been visited by Arab traders for centuries, the first permanent settlement—a Dutch colony—was not established until 1638. The last dodo died in 1662.)
    • In other words, the birds had “never encountered humans and didn’t know enough to fear us—and they looked comically plump because hungry sailors fattened them up . . . [H]umans were able to . . .keep them docile and overfed until slaughtering time.” (The meat, it’s worth noting, was not very good, and hunters had to watch out for that great big beak.)

Teachers’ Toolkit

Washington Post: Were dodos as dumb as they looked? New research suggests otherwise.

Nat Geo: All About Birds

Wikipedia Featured Article: Dodo