This video made me realize how unique and strange the Dodo really was. Its a shame that its extinct and that its depicted as nothing more than a goofy, dumb animal in modern media.
Humans like to dismiss their own responsibility/involvement in the extinction of their fellow animals. Humans drove these poor birds to extinction, then were like “oh it’s too bad they were so stupid. Clearly it’s they’re own fault that they’re all dead. Those poor stupid birds who clearly brought their extinction upon themselves 😔”
@@CJCroen1393 That's like the most deep inhale exhale moment if I've ever seen one, we killed em all and blamed it on them being stupid for generations to come
I never knew pigeons could be so beautifully colored!! This was the most in depth video I have ever seen on the dodo & I really appreciate all the free knowledge!
You're welcome! & yeah, we've studied dodos, but most media around them still uses ideas from the 1600s. If you want more info feel free to check out Darren Naish's blog post on them on his website, tetzoo.com
@@RaptorChatter will do! I think I have exhausted just about every video I can find on paleontology, so I appreciate more resources be it on new platforms. Keep doing what you are doing! I really love your "month/year" videos.
An interesting aside, I was just looking at the Ocellated Turkey from the Yucatan. While it is extremely closely related to the North American wild turkey, it has stunning irredescent plumage. It is wild to think that even within really closely related family groups coloration can vary so dramatically!
So if Dodos really were just flightless pigeons with Island giantism, do you think it could be possible to selectively breed regular, domestic pigeons into something resembling a dodo? That would be interesting. At least dodos wouldn't crap all over my balcony!
I mean pigeons are already really good at getting to islands & making things work. There's a few still knocking about even, like the island imperial pigeon in the Solomon Islands. So the fact the family has done it many times I expect that it may not even be that hard to get to at least a large bodied pigeon, flightlessness might take a bit longer, but should be well within artificial selection capabilities.
You could selectively breed humans to resemble a dodo. Most vertebrates have very similar body plans, so absolutely you can transform one bird into another. In fact, it happens in nature sometimes and is called "convergent evolution" where two unrelated species end up morphing into virtually the same body-plan to fill the same ecological niche.
Something about the dodo always seemed kind of spooky to me. I think it's because, as a child, the dodo was used as a sort of proof of concept to explain what extinction is. I of course knew of many extinct animals, primarily of dinosaurs, but they had been long gone for tens of millions of years. The dodo existed up until recent history, and because of that, many artistic depictions of animals I saw as a child in books and whatnot would often include a dodo, usually somewhere in the background or off to one side, and it always gave me a bit of a shiver. Like, here was this animal, where it should not be, and knowing why it didn't exist anymore made me fearful for what else could go extinct.
So the Dodo wasn’t actually stupid, it's just that it only had its own species to compete with. After perfecting this it became vulnerable. This strategy seems similar to a certain great ape we are all familiar with.
If you look back at history, the general pattern is: extinction level event, everything radiates into different niches that are suddenly open, one becomes top predator, and then it becomes too specialized to survive the next extinction. So yes, a certain ape... Or perhaps for my purposes, a certain hominin. The last hominin.
Very interesting matherial but I can't agree that Dodos extinction was the moment that we realised that an animal can go extinct. The first time we realised that was with the extinction of European Aurochs. Since the reign of Władysław Jagiełło ( the king of Poland-Lithuania in the first half of XV century) only the king could hunt them. Although kings didn't really do that. Later in 1599 a last herd of those animals was put under a really good protection in Jaktorowski forest. There was complete prohibition of hunting them, king also employed people who were taking care of them. Unfortunatelly that was too late for Aurochs and it went extinct anyway.
I've heard that if sailors were well supplied and part of organizations that planned to have a continued presence in the area, they would sometimes introduce pigs to islands on purpose to create a future food source. I wonder if that happened in this case.
"I rarely talk about animals that went extinct because of humans directly" well if you decide to do so again, a video on The Great Auk would be fascinating. The penguin before penguins, in a matter of speaking.
And the density of it's bones and vascular Systems have to make sacrifices, that's why we've seen large land birds a ton and have a lot of success. Like the elephant birds, the Moia birds in NZ, etc. The dodo was probably an amazing creature, just like the large giant land tortoise and how docile they are because they're environment didn't require aggression. Sadly past humans took advantage of that to hunt any animal for food or other reasons. I wish we could go back in time to save so many creatures that were sadly taken from us.
Yeah, and even pigeons are reasonably smart birds, they just seem dumb because we see them all the time, and they don't always try and fly away because they've been habituated to people. So dodos were probably as smart as any other pigeon.
I found your channel about a month or 2 ago. I am halfway through your videos. I love the detail you dedicate to each topic of each video. I have viewed 50 videos on the dodo extinction and it doesn't interest me that much anymore but I had to watch this video because of the amazing title you put on the video. You are an excellent source for detailed information in the genre you create content for. Keep grinding because your channel has the quality level of a channel with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
@@RaptorChatter my 7 yr daughter has learned alot about dinosaurs from me playing ark. A few times I have flown around the maps pointing out dinos and having her guessing them.
The world seems so small to us now, but it just seemed so huge and infinite that extinction didn't cross our minds before we witnessed it happen. Considering we were dumping all our sewage in the infinite seas, extracting resources from the infinite earth, and releasing smoke into the infinite skies to no visible effect, I wonder if the Dodo was the first time that humans realized a natural resource could even be limited.
I don't think natural resources, because there had already been wars over goods & trade before, but it was definitely the first time that extinction was recognized as something that could happen. Combined with the extinction of the the aurochs in 1627 the 1600s really put into perspective that things can go extinct everywhere, not just locally while surviving elsewhere.
@@RaptorChatter I think wars over trade and goods familiarized us with scarcity, but complete eradication was such a head trip it had us questioning our understanding of reality. (Not arguing, just developing the thought)
Another piece of evidence supporting it's easier to reach Madagascar and the nearby islands from Asia than Africa is human migration, as far as we can tell people originating in the Malay Archipelago reached the islands several hundred years before those on the coasts of modern day Mozambique and Tanzania!
Don't assume they weren't hunted, just because they tasted bad. Even dodo meat contains Vitamin C if eaten fresh. If a sailor has a choice between bad-tasting meat and scurvy he'll eat the dodo.
Fascinating that humans got blown all the way from south east asia to islands close to the african coast exactly as these two sister lineages of pigeons - madagascar's population got founded in part by ancient sea migrants from south east asia..
So they went extinct everywhere else, and we helped end them once and for all on this island. Sad, but I guess it's survival of the fittest. Wish they were still around, though, and Steller's Seacow. We have wonderful Manatees here in Florida, and hopefully they will survive us.
I mean if you might be able to clone one using another large ground pigeon egg as a vessel for the embryo. But even then it'd be pushing the size we could use.
Pigeons are actually surprisingly smart. They just seem like they're not because they're so habituated to humans that they don't always respond to people as much as we would expect them to. So the dodo may have actually been reasonably intelligent for a bird.
I Didn't Know That Dodo's Tasted Terrible I Thought To My Enemies They Taste Like Chicken Or Turkey, But Really, They Tasted Awful, Shocking And Surprising I Didn't Know That Before, For Now This Is the First Time I Know That Dodos Tasted Yucky And Inedible To Humans Not To Mention It Will Make The Sailor's Breath Stinky And Be A Lot Miserable With That, Back In The Drusty Era 1600s Thousand Years Ago
"What Did You Say To Me!?"😠 Obnoxious? You Are Obnoxious, For Hurting My Feelings I'll Call You Obnoxious For Calling Me That Unpleasant Word You Said To Me I Just Type The Way I Am, And Do, To Say That To Express Other Videos When Expressing My Thoughts About All The RU-vid Videos. Doesn't Mean I'm Bad "I'M NOT BAD"
The hoatzin is a herbivore, eating leaves and fruit, and has an unusual digestive system with an enlarged crop used for fermentation of vegetable matter, in a manner broadly analogous to the digestive system of mammalian ruminants en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoatzin They can fly but aren't great at it. The young are noted for their climbing ability.
