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b'Thanks to Wilmer and Carson for suggesting we revisit the dodo!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nDodos and spotted green pigeons are descendants of an island-hopping bird\\n\\nOn the possible vernacular name and origin of the extinct Spotted Green Pigeon Caloenus maculata\\n\\nGiant, fruit-gulping pigeon eaten into extinction on Pacific islands\\n\\nA taxidermied dodo:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Nicobar pigeon, happily still alive [photo by Devin Morris - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110541928]:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe 1823 illustration of the spotted green pigeon:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week we\\u2019re going to revisit a bird that everyone\\u2019s heard of but no one has seen alive, because it\\u2019s famously extinct. We talked about the dodo way back in episode 19, so it\\u2019s definitely time we talked about it again. Thanks to Wilmer and Carson for suggesting it! We\\u2019re also going to learn about some of the close relations of the dodo.\\n\\nThe first report of a dodo was in 1598 by Dutch sailors who stopped by the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Mauritius is east of Madagascar, which is off the eastern coast of Africa. The last known sighting of a dodo was in 1662, just 64 years later. The dodo went extinct so quickly, and was so little known, that for a couple of centuries afterwards many people assumed it was just a sailor\\u2019s story. But there were remains of dodos, and in the 19th century scientists gathered up everything they could find to study the birds. More remains were found on Mauritius.\\n\\nIn the wild, the dodo was a sleek bird that could run quite fast. It may have eaten crabs and other small animals as well as roots, nuts, seeds, and fruit. It was also probably pretty smart. People only thought it was dumb because it didn\\u2019t run away from sailors\\u2014but it had no predators on Mauritius so never had to worry about anything more dangerous than an occasional egg-stealing crab before.\\n\\nWhen humans arrived on Mauritius, they killed and ate dodos and their eggs. What the sailors didn\\u2019t eat, the animals they brought with them did, like pigs and rats. It was a stark and clear picture of human-caused extinction, shocking to the Victorian naturalists who studied it.\\n\\nA lot of the drawings and paintings we have of dodos were made from badly taxidermied birds or from overfed captive birds. At least eleven live dodos were brought to Europe and Asia, some bound for menageries, some intended as pets. The last known captive dodo was sent to Japan in 1647.\\n\\nThe dodo grew over three feet tall, or almost a meter, with brown or gray feathers, a floofy tuft of gray feathers as a tail, big yellow feet, and a weird head. The feathers stopped around the forehead, making it look sort of like it was wearing a hood. Its face was bare and the bill was large, bulbous at the end with a hook, and was black, yellow, and green. The dodo looks, in fact, a lot like what you might expect pigeons to evolve into if pigeons lived on an island with no predators, and that\\u2019s exactly what happened.\\n\\nThe dodo\\u2019s closest living relation is the Nicobar pigeon, which can grow 16 inches long, or over 40 cm. Like other pigeons, the dodo\\u2019s feathers probably had at least some iridescence, but the Nicobar pigeon is extra colorful. Its head is gray with long feathers around its shoulders like a fancy collar, and the rest of its body is metallic blue, green, and bronze with a short white tail. Zoos love to have these pigeons on display because they\\u2019re so pretty. It\\u2019s a protected animal, but unfortunately it\\u2019s still captured for sale on the pet black market or just hunted for food. It only lays one egg a year so it doesn\\u2019t reproduce very quickly, and all this combined with habitat loss make it an increasingly threatened bird. Scientists are trying to learn more about it so it can be better protected.\\n\\nThe Nicobar pigeon lives on a number of islands in the South Pacific and it can fly.'