Because the fogey went extinct less than a 100 after world first arrive on its aboriginal island of Mauritius , our noesis of the great flightless doll is limited and comes almost exclusively from drawings and description by sailor who saw it in the 17th century . Dodos had no instinctual fear of human being , who finally hunt them into quenching , so they get a report forbeing dumb — the very embodiment of a creature destined for obsolescence .
But a newfangled study suggests that the dodo was , in reality , jolly intelligent . Though collect rude history specimen was not a popular pastime in the age of the fossil , scientist at the American Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum of Denmark managed to get ahold of one of the rare preserved fogy specimens — a skull housed in the collections of London ’s Natural History Museum .
After scanning the skull , lead investigator Eugenia Gold created virtualendocasts — casts of the interior caries of the skull showing impressions left by the nous . With these 3D models , she and her squad were able-bodied to compare the dodo ’s brainiac to those of several varieties of pigeons ( the fogy ’s closest living relative ) and an nonextant island bird sleep together as the Rodrigues solitaire ( its closest dead one ) . As they cover in an clause in theZoological Journal of the Linnean Society , the dodo ’s wit was quite normal relative to its trunk size , designate the boo was n’t particularly dim - witted .
practical endocasts of the dodo ’s brain
“ It ’s not imposingly big or imposingly small — it ’s on the dot the size you would predict it to be for its body sizing , ” Au explains in an AMNH military press release . “ So if you take brain size as a proxy for intelligence , fossil probably had a similar word level to pigeons . There ’s more to intelligence than just overall brain size , but this gives us a introductory bill . ” But if they were anything like pigeons , dodos were probably pretty clever . Though they ’re more often thought of as urban pests , pigeons are able-bodied todistinguishbetween live and pre - recorded videos of themselves , and have been trained to serve asspies , couriers , and evencancer spotters .
All images courtesy the American Museum of Natural History
