In honor of Charles Darwin, born on Feb. 12, 1809, consider the dodo.
A very interesting animal, one that people have been interested in for a long time. The bird lived in paradise.
Anyone in business might do well to consider the life lesson about how a storm of change in the dodo's environment led to its rapid demise.
"I think, several things make the dodo worth studying," said Jane Pickering, deputy director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History in Connecticut.
"The only evidence we have are drawings and paintings of the time, when the dodo was first discovered," she noted. "A Dutch ship landed on Mauritius in 1598, and there is a published narrative about the visit with a picture of the dodo in it."
The Dutch colonized Mauritius, an island off the coast of Africa.
"A few birds were brought back on ships, kept alive. And we think that they may have gotten fat because they were stuck in cages, weren't able to run around. We don't really know what it looked like, but we now think it was a lot slimmer. Recent reconstructions are not like the classic picture that people have in their heads, of a dodo being round, sort of fat bird."
The dodo lived in the forest and foraged for foods similar to the way wild pigs live now. It nested on the ground and had no natural predator.
"Unfortunately, that was the dodo's undoing.
"When people arrived on the island, they started hunting the birds. They bought animals with them, cats and dogs and monkeys. And rats that were on the ships also came ashore.
Because there were no native mammals on Mauritius, they penetrated the deep forest and changed the environment, forever.
"The dodo was extinct less than 100 years after people arrived. Most likely the rats ate the dodo's eggs, since they were just sitting on the ground, nested. That's probably the main reason they went extinct. We killed them off very fast, which is sad, but not untypical."
The other thing that people talk about is what sort of bird was the dodo and how did it get there, Pickering notes. "The island is volcanic, it literally rose up out of the sea. So how did this bird that doesn't fly get to the middle of the ocean?
"We have discovered that the dodo is a giant pigeon, using DNA (taken from the leg bone) to see what it is related to. What we think happened - after the island becomes and risen out of the sea - a sort of pigeon arrived, stayed, over time, they had no natural predators. With no predators, they did not fly around and they got bigger, which is very common in an island environment -small animals tend to get bigger, and large animals tend to get smaller. That's what we think.
"The dodo only came from that island, and it is completely unique."
There are no complete dodo specimens. There are no photographs of it.
"The most complete set is at Oxford. A dodo head and a foot," said Pickering, who served as curator at the Oxford University Museum, and afterwards, as director of the MIT Museum, before her position at Yale Peabody.
"We put our dodo skeleton on display because people just love it. The dodo won the 'People's Choice' award."
There are remains at the Natural Museum in London; Copenhagen; Prague. And perhaps some still undiscovered on Mauritius. Recent work by an international expedition team on the island has uncovered dodo bones and grave pits.
Note: Museum visitors can enjoy a reading from a letter written by Charles Darwin Aug. 31, 1880, to O.C. Marsh, Yale paleontologist/Peabody’s first unofficial director at the Peabody’s “Birthday Party for Charles Darwin” at 4:45 p.m. Feb. 12.
Images: Top, Jane Pickering at Yale Peabody with dodo, Anders Helm; middle, the island of Mauritius, www.mauritius.net.
