(thought to be the first human-caused example) caught the 19th century public’s imagination as its fossils were being discovered, & it’s no coincidence that Lewis Carroll (the penname of Charles Dodgson) included a Dodo in his 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 🪶Dodgson & his real-life crush,

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that convincing arguments were made that the Dodo was a type of pigeon! The Dodo’s closest living relative is a #bird I'd dearly love to see someday, the Nicobar Pigeon (I have its picture on my fridge from an old calendar). The closest I've ever seen is an African Green Pigeon. The Dodo extinction

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of the species, a few intact skeletons & other preserved bones & one dried head (with/ soft tissues & a few feathers🪶); it now resides in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The head itself was cut in half in the 1840s for study; it was from that exam (& of a dried foot that's now lost)

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to Europe & Asia; one sent to Japan in 1647 is thought to have been last living Dodo in captivity. A Dodo sighting in 1662 by shipwrecked Dutch mariner who described #birds caught on a small islet near Madagascar was likely the last known wild sighting. These days we have a few contemporary artworks

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killed them for meat & also inadvertently brought invasive species such as dogs, pigs, cats, rats, & monkeys that preyed on young #birds & Dodo eggs, & changed the island’s habitat. In the first half of the 1600s, the Dodo was enough of a curiosity that specimens (live, dried, taxidermied) were sent

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