Tragically for the dodos, each devoured egg represented a female dodo's only chance for reproduction that year. Rather, a host of introduced species - including rats, pigs, goats and monkeys - likely caught and ate dodos and their eggs, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. (Image credit: ZU_09/Getty Images)Īnd it wasn't just humans who consumed the dodos. Wildlife on Mauritius evolved to fill various ecological niches, but these isolated species were slow to respond to newly arrived threats from across the ocean, National Geographic reported.For example, dodos were said to have no fear of humans who landed on their island beaches, so the birds were easily caught and killed by hungry Dutch sailors.Īrtistic representations of dodos historically represented the birds as rotund, slow and clumsy, but recent research hints otherwise. Highly specialized to its environment, the flightless and slow-to-reproduce species was vulnerable to the sudden introduction of predators in its once-safe island home.įor millions of years before human explorers set foot on Mauritius, the island had no large, land-based predators.

The dodo went extinct through a fatal combination of slow evolution and fast environmental changes, according to National Geographic. Later, deforestation removed much of the dodo's woodland habitat, researchers reported in 2009 in the journal Oryx. By then, previous visitors to the island had already introduced so many predators that dodos no longer roamed the beaches and mountains. Mauritius and its neighboring islands harbored no permanent human population before the Dutch East India Company established a settlement there in the 1600s, according to the Stanford University Department of Anthropology. Mauritius is located about 700 miles (1,100 km) from Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Dodos lived on the subtropical volcanic island of Mauritius, now an independent state made up of several islands in the Indian Ocean.

Dodo bird from ice age