The iconic dodo bird apparently looked a lot different than its depiction in popular culture, according to new laser scans of dodo skeletons at the Natural History Museum in Port Louis, Mauritius.
Standing about 3 feet tall, the flightless dodo bird has been extinct since 1693, dying off less than 100 years after the Dutch discovered the Indian Ocean's Mauritius Island. The unusual creature, which stands as the most famous creature to become extinct, has been misunderstood by scientists ever since.
"The skull of the dodo is so large and its beak so robust that it is easy to understand that the earliest naturalists thought it was related to vultures and other birds of prey, rather than the pigeon family," said researcher Hanneke Meijer of the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain, as quoted by Discovery News.
Scientists used dodo samples from the museum, which holds the only known complete dodo skeleton as well as composite specimens from several birds.
With the aid of 3D scanning, the researchers were able to recreate a dodo bird skeleton that showed how it moved and lived, iO9 reported.
While the dodo has long been portrayed as a fat, waddling creature, the new scans reveal that the bird was likely more graceful than pop culture gives it credit for.
"[The reconstruction] suggests that the 'fat dodo' would have been too heavy for its skeleton to support and would have collapsed," said the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. "A new reconstruction of the dodo is much slimmer and looks more similar to the earliest drawings of the bird."
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